Stephen Linard obituary: fashion designer behind David Bowie’s Eighties look

It was a rite of passage for second-year students at Saint Martin’s School of Art to organise the Alternative Fashion Show but the class of 1978 had a prim and pedestrian middle-class style, the flamboyant, Essex-born Stephen Linard — a first year — decided to take matters into his own hands.

His Neon Gothic collection (a play on neo-gothic) out-rebelled every other designer. It featured a grosgrain suit with a dog collar, sported by a young George O’Dowd (later Boy George); bald models in monk’s habits with mock halos and black lipstick; and a man dressed in a white silk suit as a “space-age pope”. Linard could be seen strutting around in a clerical collar and crucifix. “Gothic punk had just started with bands such