Designer Pam Hogg: ‘Kids at school called me a witch. But I loved it!’

Pam Hogg has boarded the train. Her laughter and salty language ring down the carriage as she looks for her seat. A delicate form in a full-length leather coat and late-1970s retro-futuristic sunglasses, streamers of acid-yellow hair, tattooed hands and lips painted pillar box red, she is part glamour puss, part Judge Dredd — and sounds like a one-woman riot. “Excuse my language!” she implores commuters.

She introduces herself, then launches into a bewildering stream of anecdotes, explanations and confessions — a story from three years ago of pushing herself to the point of exhaustion to finish a couture collection, dwindling funds, being hospitalised with pneumonia, discovering she was dyslexic and just about delivering her 2020 autumn/winter London Fashion Week show, which — she lowers her Glaswegian tones and grasps my arm — “nearly killed me”.

“Couture pieces — my sculptures, I call them — come into my head all the time. But in fashion you need structure, you need finances. I don’t even have a proper website. I’m doing it all on my own, the best way, the only way, I can.”

Hogg, a self-confessed motormouth, is also endearing. And her tale is illustrative of the combination of self-reliance, resourcefulness and a compulsive work ethic that have sustained her career for more than 40 years.

She is best known as an independent fashion designer: self-taught, uncompromisingly DIY, a punky outlier who emerged from London’s early-1980s New Romantic scene (she never gives her age but, given her history, must be about 60).

Despite being the perennial outsider, she regularly puts on shows at LFW. This Saturday, she will unveil They Burn Witches Don’t They, a collection of 30 pieces, half of which were handmade by Hogg alone in her Hackney studio. She was, she says, still perfecting a catsuit at 3am the night before our interview.

“The couture collection is dedicated to Vivienne [Westwood, Hogg’s longtime friend and champion, who died in December] and all other people who are misunderstood,” she says. Where does the title come from? “I was brought up in Scotland in the Spiritualist church, and the kids at school would say, ‘Pam Hogg’s a witch!’ But I loved it!” she says, jabbing a finger at an imaginary tormentor.

Without a licensing partner for potentially lucrative categories such as fragrance or eyewear, Hogg seems to stand outside the industry, serving a modest number of clients wanting a style with a pop-art theatrical edge. The transformational powers of her latex and colourblock catsuits have been understood for decades by luminaries from Siouxsie Sioux to Kylie Minogue and Rihanna. Michèle Lamy, the French designer, has just ordered a piece.

Fashion has never been enough. Hogg is a natural polymath who quit the industry to form a band, Doll, in the early 1990s, returning only at the end of that decade. She still makes music. (“I can’t not — it just tumbles out.”)

She has also turned her skills to teaching and theatrical costume. Art is another pursuit. Today, she is travelling from London to Colchester for the opening of Big Women, a group show at the Firstsite gallery curated by Hogg’s friend, artist Sarah Lucas, of work by leading British women artists. Hogg holds her own alongside work by Gillian Wearing, Maggi Hambling and Polly Morgan.

“You know when they did that [David] Bowie show at the V&A? For a long time I’ve thought, Pam could do that,” says Lucas. “So in a way, this is a small step towards Pam’s big retrospective.”

Big Women opened the week before LFW. It was a lot of work, and her time and energy are depleted — which explains why she talks at speed and asks to fit in our interview on the train. She speaks with regret of turning down invitations because of her workload. But she insists she operates best at breakneck pace.

Hogg has a bricolage approach to fashion design, constantly reworking archive pieces for a new era, adding layers of fabric, embellishing. “They call it upcycling these days, but I’ve been doing it since I was six with hand-me-downs. I never throw anything away,” she says. Even today, everything she wears is second-hand or of her own design.

Her piece at Big Women opens the show — an installation that reworks the finale dress to Will There Be a Mourning/Morning?, the collection that took such a toll on her health in 2020. Hogg’s towering mannequin wears a dress — part majorette, part Marie Antoinette — fashioned from an altar-cloth rescued by a friend from an Italian chapel and embellished with gold thread and rhinestones. It wears an enormous headpiece like a theatrical curtain, all topped off with a golden bird in flight.

Hogg was born in Paisley into a family with little money, though her parents were supportive. She describes an unhappy school life, struggling with what she now knows was dyslexia. “All through primary school I was told I was stupid,” she says.

Clearly, she was not. After studying fine art and textiles at Glasgow School of Art, she completed an MA in print textiles at the Royal College of Art in London. In 2016, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Glasgow for her contribution to fashion — a massive vindication — and in 2018 held Dr Hogg’s Divine Disorder, her biggest solo survey exhibition, at The Gallery in Liverpool. Her work is in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

But the fashion industry held little appeal for Hogg as a young woman. “It seemed dictatorial and nothing really interested me except Mary Quant, which at least seemed fresh,” she says. Then she discovered Westwood, with her rough, handmade, irreverent designs, and “everything just made sense”.

Hogg’s fashion career began soon after, when she made an outfit to wear to London’s Blitz club at the dawn of the 1980s. “Steve Strange decided who could come in and who couldn’t. He’d turned Mick Jagger away for wearing the wrong shoes. I was scared I wouldn’t get past, but he said come in, and that’s when I decided to make clothes.” Her first show followed soon after, in 1985.

Hogg talks of pushing herself to finish shows, then “going into hibernation”. A licensing deal would ease her resources and she says she has come close to signing them, but she adds she always feared losing creative control.

“And I get to take a chance, not just following what I think people want because when you do, you won’t move much further than that,” she says. “Think ahead, think of something exciting that you can still do in a commercial way. That’s where I sit.”

Hogg is consistently upbeat, but there is also a fragility about her, and I wonder how much of her striving is compulsive. “It’s because I was always trying to prove I wasn’t stupid,” she says. “I’ve had to work hard — and I don’t regret it.”

Her shows are always a highlight. For Best in Show, her spring/summer 2020 collection, she sent out models with giant poodle headdresses; The Emperor’s New Clothes in 2013 featured models wearing nothing but transparent gowns.

As we walk to the gallery to see her installation, Hogg is still talking away. I point out that, despite her reputation as a fashion outlier, her most celebrated designs have endured. Conceptually, her catsuits look much as they did in the 1980s: modern-day classics. “And people keep requesting them,” she says. “I think that’s a validation.”

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