Murray and Vern is a British design studio and clothing shop, founded in Manchester in 1984 by Angela Murray and Stuart Vern. They took latex up early, and they are counted among the people who carried a fetish look into a wider pop culture. The clothes pull in the dance-club floor, gay nightlife, the fetish scene, and performance art, and they put latex design on British television and in films. Pieces sit in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The studio started on Whitworth Street in Manchester. Through the eighties and nineties that area was a hub of the city’s gay scene and its clubs, next to the bar Manto and the clubs Paradise Factory and The Hacienda. The first shop was in Afflecks Palace, and a later one was in Kensington Market. Early catalogues were titled PURE, designed by The Designers Republic, and the clothes appeared in Skin Two, the fetish-fashion magazine people used as a reference. In 1992 the label showed Fags And Slags at Flesh, the Hacienda’s monthly gay night. Pam Hogg, The Divine David (David Hoyle), DJ Paulette, and other friends and performers from that world were in it. The show toured and closed at Rubber Ball, the fetish night at the Hammersmith Palais. The same year i-D put Murray and Vern on its list of the 100 most influential designers in the world. Sign of the Times and Kim West in London, and Patricia Field in New York, stocked the clothes.
In 1994 the studio moved to London. The label then appeared in the V&A Streetstyle exhibition, and the museum issued postcards of the designs. In the late nineties they showed at Ministry of Sound, with a performance by Minty. With The Designers Republic they put out a booklet called Murray and Vern Vs The Designers Republic, sold at Foyles and at Tate Modern. They played the club nights as well: Naked and Famous at The 333 Club on Old Street, and Absinthe, Ketamine and Guns at The Strongroom, a studio designed by Jamie Reid, where a piece written by Irvine Welsh was performed. The night’s name is the night’s name. In 1999 Derek Ridgers photographed the shop display on Brewer Street in Soho.
In the 2000s they kept moving between fashion and performance, in club nights with Simon Hoare, Tania Glyde, and Michelle Olley, and they opened a shop in Camden. The website went up in 1998. In 2000 i-D named it website of the month, and the label appeared on Channel 4’s Big Breakfast. The business stopped trading in 2002. Angela Murray later took degrees in counselling and in photography. Stuart Vern kept designing under PURE and moved into film-set design. In 2023 the two of them started working together again, on the archive and on new designs. In 2024, around the book The Hacienda – Threads: A Celebration of Music, Fashion and Friendship, Angela Murray sat on a round table about the Manchester scene with Noel Gallagher, Peter Hook, and others. Stuart Vern was not on that panel. The same year Toby Mott’s Transgression in the UK included pictures and quotes from the label.
Bond, Baileys, and the museum shelf
The clothes show up in films and ads: latex catsuits in the opening credits of the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough, the main costume in a 2012 Baileys advertisement, custom clothes for a campaign by the Italian shoemaker Inniu, and latex set dressing in the 2017 science-fiction film Beyond Skyline. Peter Ashworth’s photograph of a model on a spiked sofa in a Murray and Vern catsuit was the cover of the 1992 catalogue and became one of the pictures people still point at. In the V&A, the holdings include a red safety-pin dress from the Street Style exhibition of 1994–95, and from 1994 a pair of lime-green latex stockings and a pair of silver rubber stockings. Angela Murray and Stuart Vern designed the lines. New pieces sell through the official site and selected shops. Older garments are what collectors look for. The label’s own social channels keep a record of the house after it came back: club floor, then a glass case, then the archive opened again.
