Totally Stockholm 1
“It was a great mix, indeed. There were people wh
o just came there to escape, because it was exciting and trendy. Jean made the rule, that in order to get in, you had to have notable style. Go home and change, or get in by wearing your underpants. And that, they did. The suit guys from Café Opera had to strip down in the cloakroom, so that everyone would be on the same level. The headlines in the tabloid Expressen read, ‘Stockholm’s secret sex and entertainment life’.” Åsa Pettersson, Åsa & Eva, Extrakt Benita Ben Djama, Raul Blanco Åsa Pettersson, John Thelin of those wild nights, where how you looked and what attitude you brought was more important than what you were doing or where you came from. Now he’s released a book – No Limit: Stockholm Clubland 1992-1995 – depicting a time when Stockholm became cool and the eyes of the world turned to this cold corner of Europe for inspiration. Apart from obviously sitting on all this image material from this era, why did you decide on compiling it into a book? And why now? Actually one of the clubbers in the book, XLNT Marc, came up with the idea that I should do a ‘before and after’ series using these old images. His point being that most of the club kids belonging to that era are still holding up pretty well, himself especially. I liked the before and after idea, though my interest was not in showing how young and cool everybody still looks. I knew I was sitting on unique material that would be interesting to review after all these years. I started to sift through my old negatives and discovered a much bigger treasure than I had imagined. I thought, if I am to track down all these people to take new photos, I might as well interview them too. For this I engaged Mikael Bohman, a legendary club kid and dedicated worshiper of the ‘90s. In the end I wrote most of the text, while Mikael conducted most of the interviews. 12 “The last few years of the 80s, Stockholm club culture grew from a small clique of cool city kids to a much larger scene, as house and techno took over. So in the early ‘90s something new happened in Stockholm. A group of driven and extroverted adventurers from all over met at Stockholm’s clubs and with them a new attitude was born: do whatever you want, look the way you want – anything is possible! The ambition was to have fun, live for the moment and do your thing. This group put Stockholm on the map and laid the foundation for the city’s status as a mecca for design, fashion, music and IT, something we today take for granted.” Mikael Bohman Mikael Bohman