Pam Hogg obituary: iconoclastic Scottish fashion designer

Such a maverick philosophy was drawn from the post-punk era in which Hogg the fashion designer was born, but she was entirely self-taught, self-reliant and punishingly hardworking, having been raised in a working-class home in Glasgow. She almost never exhibited anything she had not cut, sewn or fitted herself, even in 2014, when her reputation as an underground innovator had shifted into the mainstream. For Future Past, a collection “about war and peace” that featured an apron dress with “the soils of war” scrawled on the back, military garb stained with blood and pioneer skirts and bonnets (to signify peace) she collected bags of old plastic flowers from junk shops, scrubbed them in her bath and crafted each individual headpiece.

It was this entrepreneurial, can-do spirit that got her into the post-punk scene in the first place. In the early 1980s the trend-setting club for New Romantics, the Blitz in Covent Garden, favoured outrageous garments and entry was notoriously selective. The doorman, Steve Strange, was famous for turning down those who didn’t fit the bill — including, one evening, Mick Jagger, who was said to be wearing the wrong sort of shoes.

Hogg had been stitching her own clothes for some time and decided to dye her hair peroxide blonde and flaunt some of her new wares to gain entry. “I was pretty shy back then and waiting in the queue hearing Steve Strange have a go at nearly everyone for having the audacity to actually think they could pass his inspection made me turn and leave,” she said. “He immediately pounced, asking where I thought I was going. He said, ‘You belong, get in!’” There she rubbed shoulders with the likes of David Bowie, Billy Idol, Spandau Ballet and Boy George, whose androgynous, glam-rock aesthetic influenced her style.

Fashion, until then, had been just a hobby but in fabric, or rather materials such as latex, she discovered a potential for unruly self-expression that chimed with her punk peers. Plus, there was nothing in the shops she wanted to buy. The reaction to her outfits was immediate among the clubgoers and magazine editors of the time and in 1984 the fashion designer Joe Casely-Hayford encouraged her to open a store in Soho. Her first well-known customer was Ian Astbury of the Cult, who told interviewers that she was his favourite designer.

Soon her trademark latex catsuits were being worn by Siouxsie Sioux and Paula Yates and were stocked in the London boutique Hyper Hyper as well as Harrods and Bloomingdale’s. Her first show, Psychedelic Jungle, came in 1985. Four years later i-D magazine called her “the most consistently inventive British fashion designer (alongside Vivienne Westwood)” and by 1990 Terry Wogan declared that she had reached “cult status”. She had appeared on his show “off my head”, she said. “I was wearing my black PVC leggings and Terry Wogan remarked that they looked uncomfortable. So my immediate reaction was: ‘Are they?’ and I sat on his lap.”

She was nothing if not unpredictable and by 1992 she had all but disappeared from the scene when she became lead singer of a punk band called Doll, which supported Debbie Harry in 1993; in the late Seventies her first band, Rubbish, had supported the Pogues.

Hogg’s iconoclasm bled into different art forms — theatre, music, art — which she saw as tending to the same irreverent goal. She is said to have written lyrics five minutes before going on stage, just as she might finish sewing a piece as models were going on the catwalk. Her fashion was theatre; her art was fashion (in 2023 she exhibited in a show alongside Maggi Hambling) and music fed all of them like a vital undercurrent.

It all originated from an essential restlessness and certain frenziedness; she overworked then crashed — “my life is nothing to me”, she once said, “if I’m not working” — and she was messy and chaotic, in life and work. She broke the law “many, many times”, mainly from doing “lots of illegal drugs” and once driving the Gumball rally without a licence. Even her throaty laugh was explosive — but all she was ever being, she said, was herself. “I have no desire to be or dress or act like anyone other than myself. We all have one gift and that’s our individuality, but it seems that everyone wants to be like someone else.”

She never gave interviewers her real age, but Pamela Hogg was born sometime in 1958 or 1959 in Paisley, a town west of Glasgow. Her family had little money and her earliest form of fashion was modifying hand-me-downs from richer neighbours — her father had a knack for turning pieces of junk into gifts — yet she described her school life as unhappy. She had dyslexia and was told she was stupid. Hogg once said her restless drive stemmed from proving her teachers wrong.

Her parents were eager for her to cut her own path and, 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. Nothing in the fashion world truly captured Hogg’s attention until she encountered the “fresh” designs of Mary Quant and Westwood’s sardonic, rough-and-ready garments. At that point, she said, “everything just made sense”.

After her music hiatus (or rather creative continuation) Hogg returned to fashion in the 2000s, when her catsuits found a new audience in Kate Moss, Rihanna, Björk, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé. More aristocratic clients included Princess Diana, Princess Eugenie and Lady Mary Charteris, for whom she designed a risqué sheer wedding dress.

The industry had changed and at first she was unable to afford a studio, working from her kitchen table, but the boldness continued. In 1999 she made a short film, Accelerator, starring Anita Pallenberg and Bobby Gillespie. Three years later she was persuaded by Jason Buckle, a musician who has collaborated with Jarvis Cocker, to start yet another band called Hoggdoll and her 2010 collection, Goddess at War, featured a wedding dress covered in dirt, bones and her own blood — “Whenever I cut my hand working,” she said, “I would smear it on the thing.”

Her Emperor’s New Clothes collection stirred trouble three years later with its full frontal nudity and when shooting her designs for the 2012 Edinburgh International Fashion Festival she stood in the middle of the road, halting traffic. “It almost caused a jam as the drivers couldn’t take their eyes off my half-naked girls, one wearing only padlock and chains roped up to a Roman pillar.”

Like her age, Hogg was private about her relationships, so little is known about her survivors.

Even once she had established herself, Hogg’s career hung on a delicate thread between the avant-garde and the mainstream. In 2023 she unveiled a collection at London Fashion Week called They Burn Witches Don’t They, comprising 30 pieces handmade by Hogg alone in her Hackney studio (she never threw anything away; her designs layered recycled fabric on top of recycled fabric). Such diligence was in part about having a tight grip over the creative process. “I need to see it emerge rather than have someone draft out my idea to be made up,” she said. “Working physically with each garment allows me freedom to change route.”

The line was dedicated to Westwood, her friend and progenitor, “and all other people who are misunderstood”, she said. As for the title: “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.”

Pam Hogg, fashion designer, was born in 1958 or 1959. She died of undisclosed causes on November 26, 2025