Rebels and radicals: the story behind Buffalo's most enduring images

In 1985, London was in the grip of an underground creative revolution. Dilapidated squats were occupied by artists, anarchic club nights were being thrown by performers like Leigh Bowery, and designers like Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano were redefining the boundaries of style. Among them all was a disruptive group who, in the pursuit of a new kind of fashion image, ended up pioneering a movement that would forever hold a special place in the story of British culture. They are, of course, Buffalo – a tight-knit collective founded by photographer Jamie Morgan and the late stylist Ray Petri, later joined by names like Nick and Barry Kamen, Mark Lebon, Judy Blame, and Neneh Cherry.

Everything they stood for was in the name. Buffalo adopted the Caribbean phrase to describe the rebel or ‘rude boy’, and as such, they cared little for the shoots in Vogue. Buffalo had its own ideas about what was beautiful. They cast diverse models found on the streets, put men in skirts, and dressed kids as mobsters, shooting them with the wit of the underdog and the poised reverence of Richard Avedon. Largely published in The Face and i-D, their work changed the very fabric of those magazines, which, before Buffalo, mainly mixed music profiles and straight-up street photography. Buffalo put a new face of fashion front and centre – but more than that, it went beyond fashion itself. The swagger of their MA1 bomber-jacketed crew rippled into music and nightlife, inspiring generations of creatives that came after them. Several figures at the forefront of British creativity today – Ibrahim Kamara, Campbell Addy, and Martine Rose, among them – trace their journeys back to its subversive ideas of style. 40 years later, and the spirit of Buffalo still very much lives on.

1985, a new book from IDEA, marks the four-decade anniversary of the pivotal studio. Morgan, its founding member, is behind its personally configured pages. It all began last year when Buffalo girl Naomi Campbell asked him to unearth an early shot of her, then just 15, for her exhibition at the V&A Museum. “I had to go back to my archive to find it,” Morgan says, speaking over the phone. “I discovered a box labelled 1985. It was a lightbulb moment. I thought, ‘I wonder if there are enough images in there for a book.’ Lo and behold, there were contact sheets and all these unseen negs. I found outtakes of Naomi smiling, and there were shots of Kate [Moss] in there from a go-see. I can't even remember shooting half of it.”

Focusing on Buffalo’s black-and-white images from the year 1985, or thereabouts, the resulting book is a thing of tactile analogue beauty. Painstakingly sequenced by Morgan, it mixes scanned contact sheets, restored lost negatives, and some of the studio’s most iconic shots from the height of its influence. “I kind of felt when it was 40 years, which is this year, I wanted to respect Ray and show the work in its purity,” says Morgan. “Even though it’s wonderful that people have been inspired by it, I wanted to go, this is the work. This is the pure work. Beyond the Buffalo collective, my relationship with Ray was just so beautiful and powerful. I wanted to celebrate that.”

Morgan met Petri only a few years before the period the book captures. A “wayward teenager” who refused to sit exams, he escaped to Paris at 17, taking up a job at Magnum Photos where he spent his days developing prints for masters like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullin, and Elliott Erwitt. Upon returning to London, he cut his teeth assisting East End legend Terence Donovan, and by 1982 had struck out on his own, taking up a studio space in a site during the months before its redevelopment, where he shot New Romantics coming in and out of the squats.

“In walked Ray to the studio, with his pork pie hat and penny loafers, just effortlessly cool,” Morgan remembers. “It’s like he floated on air this guy. Ray was gay and very beautifully dressed. He’d just finished doing an art course at Sotheby’s and he wanted to learn photography. I was coming out of my punk phase, Dr Martens and ripped clothes. He was ten years older than me. We were very, very different, but we just had a great connection.”

That sense of being outsiders fuelled our relationships with people. Once we realised we could cast whoever we liked, it really began to shape what we were doing – Jamie Morgan

The unlikeliness of their pairing, Morgan says, was also the magic behind Buffalo’s success. Scotland-born Petri had travelled through India and Africa before they met, accumulating a breadth of interests across cultures, art history and music. Out of this, he forged a style that would shape British fashion for decades to come, where sportswear, pirate regalia, Che Guevara berets, and the most lustrously designed luxury clothes could all belong to the same story. Disregarding the boundaries of ‘high and low’, Petri celebrated the beauty in myriad pockets of life, reflecting the rich melting pot of creativity in London more vividly than anything else at the time.

The pair’s first shoot for The Face, “Winter Sports”, ushered in this radical new look. Sexy, witty, and completely novel, it saw Petri and Morgan dress up brothers, Nick and Barry Kamen, in white lipstick, cycling jackets, Puma beanies, and aviator shades. It was an instant sensation and stands as one of the magazine’s most memorable covers to this day. “I had shot a fashion story for The Face with swimmers that everyone really liked, and Nick Logan asked if I wanted to do one with men,” Morgan remembers. “Ray was the only stylish man I knew, so I asked him to do it with me. That’s how we started.”

Beyond the raw eclecticism of its look, what was striking about Buffalo was that its characters were always more compelling than the clothes themselves. Many weren’t models at all, but a diverse mix of people Petri and Morgan met on the streets of London. “Ray had spent time in Africa and said, ‘I’d love to use Black models,’” Morgan says. “We called the coolest agency at the time and they sent us Nick Kamen, who’s half Burmese. They said, ‘That’s the closest we can do to Black.’ So we just started looking on the streets. We’d find models anywhere – the shebeens of Notting Hill, someone working in a grocery shop, at a garage, or mending their bike on the pavement. That sense of being outsiders fuelled our relationships with people. Once we realised we could cast whoever we liked, it really began to shape what we were doing.”

We found these spaces where men could play with other ideas of masculinity... On the other side of that, we questioned why girls had to be ‘pretty’ – Jamie Morgan

Perhaps Buffalo’s most enduring legacy lies in this radical rethinking of beauty. In contrast to the whitewashed pages of magazines at the time, their visual world was a melting pot of culture, race, age and gender – where men could be soft and women tough. “We found these spaces where men could play with other ideas of masculinity,” says Morgan. “When we looked out into the world of culture, men were the flamboyant ones. It was only in Britain that they were stiff, wearing suits. On the other side of that, we questioned why girls had to be ‘pretty’. Lisa Soto came along, she’s from Puerto Rico, with cropped hair. She looked tough as nails, actually more masculine than Nick [Kamen], who was perhaps more feminine.”

The wider world started taking notice; the year they released their infamous “Men in Skirts” editorial, Jean Paul Gaultier designed an entire collection inspired by it. As they began gaining momentum, Petri and Morgan were joined by a circle of creatives who shared their vision, including Mark Lebon and musician Neneh Cherry, who released her single “Buffalo Stance” in 1988. “We started to gather a tribe, if you like,” says Morgan. “Buffalo, for so many reasons, became the right name. It spoke to being the underdog: ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ from Bob Marley, Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Girls’, and the buffalo in American Indian culture as a symbol of authenticity and respect. It was also a Jamaican term, and we were deeply involved in Jamaican culture. What really settled it was when Gaultier invited us to Paris to see his skirts collection. The security were these big guys from Guadeloupe in MA1 jackets – our uniform – with little tags that read ‘Buffalo Security’. From then on, we started naming everything Buffalo.”

I think the legacy of Buffalo, really, is the diversity that it encouraged... I think the authenticity of that still resonates today – Jamie Morgan

By 1985, Buffalo was a living and breathing movement. Nowhere was its visual world more powerfully expressed than in the “Killer” story shot that year, which cast 12-year-old Felix Howard as a gangster alongside a supporting cast of characters. Morgan photographed them on Tri-X 35mm film, like the Magnum photographers he had worked for in Paris, and staged the shoot with the cinematic drama of a Hollywood film. “I wasn’t sure anyone was going to get it,” Morgan says of the story, unseen images from which appear in 1985. “I said to Nick [Logan], ‘Are you sure you want a 12-year-old boy on the cover of the magazine?’ He said, ‘Yes, it’s a great image.’ And that was it. The Face was very instrumental in allowing us to experiment by keeping its pages open. We felt like anything was possible.”

When Petri died of Aids in 1989, Morgan paused shooting fashion work – but the power of Buffalo carried on. A book released in 1991 remains one of the most coveted fashion titles of contemporary times, while institutions like the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery – most recently with the 2025 exhibition The Face Magazine: Culture Shift – have commemorated its enduring influence. “The spirit of Buffalo lives deep in fashion culture,” says Morgan. “It opened the doors for everybody. A few years ago, Alister McKimm recreated the ‘Killer’ shoot with Selena Forrest. Katie Grand and Mert and Marcus reimagined the whole Buffalo book across three issues of Love. It fed into the entire next generation.”

Morgan hopes this new book might inspire future generations, as the 1990s book inspired several individuals who are shaping British fashion today. “Through the years, I would get a lot of young, mostly Black gay kids from fashion schools, like Campbell Addy and Ibrahim Kamara, reaching out saying, ‘When I saw the Buffalo book, it made me realise I have a place in the industry,’” he says. Kamara and Addy both became assistants to Morgan and Barry Kamen before creating their own visionary work. “Martine Rose has always said that to me and Grace Wales Bonner, which Ray would have been so proud of. Those characters, to me, carry the Buffalo spirit.”

For Morgan, it’s here where the power of Buffalo still lies. “I think the legacy of Buffalo, really, is the diversity that it encouraged,” he says. “We celebrated people not because they were Black, or not because they were this or that, but just because they were great. I think the authenticity of that still resonates today.”

1985 is published by IDEA and is available here now.