Who invented the Typical Girl? A celebration of Ari Up

The Slits in 1977. Ari up is third from left.  Photo - Ian Dickson

"The Slits were a feral girl gang. Aged just 15 in 1977, singer Ari Up recalls being 'wild and crazy, like an animal let loose - but an innocent little girl with it, too'. From her striking image (tangled dreadlocks, knickers worn on the outside of her clothes) to her seemingly pre-social antics, Ari inspired fear and fascination in equal measure".

- Simon Reynolds in Rip it up and Start Again

Note the knickers-over-trousers.  Photo - Caroline Coon.  

Stupidly, one of the posts that I've left on the back burner was a remembrance of Ari Up, a punk singer and forming member of The Slits. Their songs were a formative influence on me when I first went to college and was experiencing first-hand what it meant to grow up and be a woman and not someone who treated Sex and the City like a lifestyle Bible. Cut has to be one of my favourite albums. If you ever have a bad day wondering why that hot guy only likes the other hot girls, or if WAGS make you despair of your life, or bad that you don't have the same waistspan as Cheryl Cole, then listen to Typical Girls and feel much better for having the courage to just be yourself.

No prizes for guessing which one is Ari.  Photo - Ray Stevenson

Photo - Caroline Coon

From a style point of view though, Ari Up was an inspiration not in what she wore (there's NO way I could pull off the Superman look) but in her attitude towards clothing.  She wore what she wanted, when she wanted.  She had dreads piled up on top of her head like a modern day Rococo wig.  She wore facepaint twenty years before a legion of Oxegen and Glasto goers. She was variously Punk, proto-Goth and Rasta.  She applied the same freedom of thought to her wardrobe that she did to her lyrics.  She didn't really care about the judgement of others.  It suited her just fine.  And that is definitely something to admire.

R.I.P Corinne Day

L - The Face, 1990.  R - British Vogue, 1993

Channeling Richard Avedon in British Vogue, October 2007

Although I knew that Corinne Day was battling a particularly aggressive brain tumour, it still came as a horrible shock to see that Italian Vogue had confirmed this morning that she died on Saturday.

Corinne Day was a photographic visionary, a woman who was not afraid to tear up the rulebook and invent something new, brave in both her professional and personal outlook.  Although she is widely credited for discovering Kate Moss and popularising heroin chic, she will be remembered more for her photography, which blew away the 80's look of pneumatic, heavily made-up, over coiffed supermodels right out of the water.

Day's early work was clean in many respects, models were freshly scrubbed, colour palettes were monochromatic or kept to a minimum and lines were totally fuss free.  Her autobiographical aspects and knack with portraiture, the subjects often exposing a rawness or vulnerability, makes her comparable to Nan Goldin or Larry Clark.  In truth, her work reminds me of Edgar Degas, who was obsessed with photography and often included aspects of it in his paintings.  Both Degas and Day were masters and innovators of the 'unposed' pose - something that is now widely copied by many photographers.

Before she died Day was in talks with the V&A to show a retrospective of her work.  I sincerely hope that this goes ahead, because it's the kind of tribute that a photographer of her calibre truly deserves.