For their latest campaign, dunhill‘s creative director Mark Weston has tapped into the fabled enigma of London’s Blitz Club – the underground soiree of London’s New Romantics and so-called Blitz Kids that now survives only as a distant memory of Soho’s halcyon days.

During Britain’s bleak years of economic depression in the late 70s and early 80s, when rising inflation and unemployment brought strikes and fractious unrest, The Blitz Club belonged to a unique period in London’s club scene that offered an unparalleled sense of escape. Located in Covent Garden’s Great Queen Street (after moving from their original premises under a brothel in Soho), the club served as a meeting point for the capital’s biggest art schools (St Martins and Central), and ran a notoriously selective door policy that barred entry to anyone on the basis of appearance.

Celebrity got you nowhere – Mick Jagger was famously turned away – and regular attendees formed the core of London’s New Romantics, whose indelible influence across art, fashion and music is immortalised by the gender-subverting legacy of David Bowie, Boy George and Marilyn. Those legendary nights were most famously captured by British photographer Homer Sykes, who proved a key influence for dunhill’s visual approach.

“I am fascinated with The Blitz club, particularly Homer Sykes’ pictures of it,” says dunhill designer Mark Weston. “It was a place of freedom and individuality, a mix of cultures: performers, the establishment and art. We don’t seem to have that now, that collision. And the collision is important.”

Using backstage imagery from the brand’s FW20 show in Paris, Weston delivers that collision by embracing the traditional and avant-garde in his collections. The same confrontation of cultures, styles and backgrounds that defines The Blitz club’s legacy is here laid out as a blueprint for fresh ideas that toe the line between house heritage and contemporary elegance.