Totally Stockholm 1
Anna Kind, Martin Blix, Thess Mading “The first n
ight of Baby, Mats and I painted mouths on the sleeves of our jackets and each jacket had only one sleeve. We fastened strange plastic dolls to our bodies. Each night there were more guests who came dressed totally wild. At Baby, everybody could perform if they wanted. You didn’t have to be good at anything in particular, there was always someone who wanted to do some kind of peculiar act. We hosted at least twice a week for quite some time. Beckahästen at Berzelii Park one day, then Fridays at S:t Eriksterrassen.” Moa Li Lemhagen Schalin, launched the club Baby in the late ‘80s, costume designer, fashion stylist who for example bought the clothes and styled five young English ladies for their breakthrough Spice Girls video Wannabee Jonas Hallberg Carl Göran Martini, Annaminh Braun “Swedes have always been good at knowing what’s going on outside their borders, they have an innate creativity which often touches the zeitgeist. Stockholm clubs in the ‘90s were populated by a melting pot of creativity, a font of inventiveness, the fundament of which has morphed into today’s generation of directors, artists, music producers and writers, fashion designers, internet entrepreneurs, with a world impact”. Steve Blame, presenter of MTV News of MTV Europe, 1987-1994 Moa Li Lemhagen Schalin International magazines like The Face and i-D and the newly launched MTV Europe had their eyes set on Stockholm’s extravagant club scene, and in the space of a few years, the image of Stockholm abroad shifted from polar bears and hot blondes to a creative mecca. Finally, I don’t know… perhaps all generations could document a scene like this that was important for the evolution of popular culture, even if wasn’t always the ‘clubbing scene’. But in the book, Anna-Carin Mörner says “Maybe, just maybe, our generation will never fully grow up. And I’m noticing that among my friends and I, there’s this attitude that we were way cooler in the ‘90s than kids are today.” Your thoughts on that? Well that a lot of us refuse to fully grow up is indisputable, and that never really happened with previous generations. I think we even had a more casual approach to our careers and such than later generations too. Being creative and cool and knowing a lot of people would always land you a lot of opportunities, so why worry? We wanted to have fun and express ourselves creatively, and in the process make ourself a career. Were we cooler than kids are today? If you look at the right places, probably not. “In a party mood? No Limit ‘90s party, East, March 6, 23-03.” Tomas Blomqvist 15