Innes Reid

BA Photography

God Bless This Acid House

The world is made up of many different people, who are involved in many different subcultures. These subcultures take a hold of you and dictate your choices in life from the type of music you listen to, to what you wear, to even how you act overall. A particular subculture that has had an iron tight grip on a large part of society for over 30 years is rave culture.

From the Second Summer of Love when Acid House made its way from deep in the neighbourhoods of Chicago across the Atlantic to little old Britain, to open air festivals in prime city centre locations, raving has been a part of the British psyche over the last three decades. Over this vast period of time, little has really changed, and what has changed has come round in a full cycle in regards to the fashion and the music.

Reid takes on the task of investigating this trend in the rotation of the ideology, looking at the similarities and differences in the clothing choices of those involved, as well as capturing the infectious spirit of youth along the way. God Bless This Acid House depicts the freedom that rave culture gives to you through carefully selected outfits and backdrops inspired by the time where raving was condemned by the government and makeshift venues appeared up and down the quiet corners of the country during the 90s. However, these people captured in these images wouldn’t be out of place today. That’s the magic of fashion, it all comes full circle.