Ray Petri

Explores how Ray Petri and the Buffalo collective revolutionised fashion photography in the 1980s by blending subcultural style, radical diversity, and gender politics to create a new cultural template still influential today.

Scottish-born stylist Ray Petri (19481989), founder of the maverick Buffalo collective, defined the look and feel of radical 1980s magazines such as The Face, i-D, and Arena. Harnessing the power of street style, sportswear, and club culture, Petri's vision took the sartorial vocabulary of subcultural styles into the mainstream. His radical casting of Black models and his genderplay marked a culturally reflexive, political approach to the relationship between fashion and identity. Challenging the policing of masculinity and sexuality in particular, Petri's imagery boldly toyed with the iconography of homoeroticism against the backdrop of gay rights activism and the AIDS crisis. Today, the Buffalo spirit endures in the countercultural references, cultural diversity, and post-gender conversation that underlies the most powerful of contemporary fashion imagery. This book traces how Petri and Buffalo created the template for modern fashion photography by advocating for a new cultural order.