The designer Pam Hogg stayed faithful for life to the principles, practices, provocations and politics of the art school, music and club scene of her youth around 1980. The fashion industry metamorphosed over the decades since, but she went on believing in individuality and drama, painstakingly achieved. Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, Rihanna, Björk, Lady Gaga, Lily Allen, Kylie Minogue and Taylor Swift, among others, bought her garments, which were auditorium-dominating mixes of sex, eccentricity and intellect. Hogg’s catsuits in Latex and PVC became the glam workwear of the rock and pop stage. They never dated. When a star strides on stage in one, the audience knows the action is about to kick off.
Yet to the end of her life, Hogg, who has died, aged perhaps 66 (she refused to reveal her age publicly), remained a struggling artist. She hoped to arrive at the same safe destination as her long-term friend Vivienne Westwood, with an atelier equipped with pattern cutter and couture seamstresses, plus financial backing for a ready-to-wear line that would not betray her nonconforming philosophy of dress.
She did show collections at London Fashion Week and in Paris, but for a long time fitted them on her own body because she could not afford a mannequin, and sewed almost every stitch herself, at first in her kitchen and then in a studio in Hackney Wick, east London.
Hogg’s creations were technically complex and her ideas developed as she executed them, right up until the moment a model set foot on the catwalk. Financial frailty denied her the credit to buy the best materials, but that suited her ethos: she told the Guardian that her entries in the 2014 Barbican exhibition The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined, among Dior, Schiaparelli and acres of historical cloth-of-gold, “were made of old curtains I found on the market that cost me £20 for the lot. A headdress made from old plastic flowers that I found in junkshops.” Her involvement was extraordinarily personal – the smears on a wedding dress from 2010 were her own blood from pricks and cuts sustained while at work.
Hogg said she had been upcycling materials since she was six, in Paisley, Scotland, where she was born, one of four children of a father who worked as a gardener and a mother who was a telephonist, both freethinking members of a spiritualist church. School was a misery, because of what she later realised was dyslexia, but Glasgow School of Art was an inspiring harmony of high craftwork and hard wear. She was so successful studying fine art and printed textiles there that she went on for her master’s degree to the Royal College of Art in London.
Hogg’s career, though, began outside formal education, in the Tuesday night queue to enter the Blitz club in Covent Garden. The dress code was “wildly imaginative” – Blitz kickstarted the New Romantic style – and its gatekeeper, Steve Strange, let in only the most original art-student hopefuls. Hogg laboured at her sewing machine to create a competitive outfit, but still turned to leave when Strange barred the door to others (he once turned Mick Jagger away for the “wrong shoes”). However, he told Hogg: “Where d’you think you’re going? You belong. Get in.”
Competition did not ease among the chosen inside, so Hogg had to produce a fresh ensemble each week, which brought orders from fellow club-goers, and from musicians for performance gear. She was noticed by name designers such as Katharine Hamnett, and Joe Casely-Hayford introduced her into Hyper Hyper’s Kensington market of fashion stalls – in the 1980s, post-punk, early New Romantic London still had small, low-rent retail spaces. Her clothes guested in Harrods and Bloomingdale’s, New York, featured in new magazines such as the Face and i-D, and costumed MTV music videos. Enough club-goers wanted elements of Hogg to support her own shop in Newburgh Street, Soho.
And then Hogg walked away from it all. In her student days she had sung in a band, Rubbish, that supported the Pogues. (She always cut and sewed to music, and it often inspired what was created.) In 1990, she went with her then boyfriend Mary Byker when he toured the US with the supergroup Pigface. The boys in the band discovered she could sing, and dragged her onstage in Nashville to adlib to a number she had heard only a few times. She brought it off and was immediately accepted into the tour.
“I left fashion as understatedly as I’d entered it,” Hogg recalled. When she was asked by Debbie Harry to support her on the last few dates of her UK tour in 1993, Hogg had to swiftly assemble a band, Doll. The shows were a success, and Doll later opened for the Raincoats. Hogg spent over a decade in the music biz, including with her second group Hoggdoll, plus adventures in film and video scripting and directing, before returning to a changed fashion world.
She had never lost her old performer admirers, and soon won new ones, although some could not be satisfied – Beyoncé’s wardrobe people requested 24 garments to choose from, not understanding that each was an unrepeatable one-off piece sewn by Hogg herself. But in 2008, Browns of South Molton Street, London, stocked Hogg’s couture, and she showed regularly in London, and for a while in Paris, wild as ever in collection names, such as They Burn Witches Don’t They?, and Will There Be a Mourning/Morning? Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell were customers.
Hogg’s style made for exciting exhibitions, including a one-woman show at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow in 1990, and Dr Hogg’s Divine Disorder at the Gallery in Liverpool in 2018. The V&A holds pieces, which are equally at home in its theatre and fashion collections.
• Pam Hogg, designer and performer, born c1959; death announced 26 November 2025
