i-D No. 261
The Home Issue — Lady Sovereign by Alasdair McLellan · grime / UK hip-hop / Kim Jones / Pharrell Williams
i-D No. 261, The Home Issue, December 2005, with Lady Sovereign photographed by Alasdair McLellan.
Read the catalogue note →- Publication
- i-D
- Condition
- Very Good appearance from supplied cover, interior and rear-cover photographs — ungraded magazine.
- Completeness
- Treated as complete under the owner’s standing magazine workflow unless stated otherwise. Front cover, selected interior pages and rear cover are photographed; no page-by-page physical collation has been performed.
- Date
- December 2005
Catalogue note
i-D No. 261, The Home Issue, December 2005, with Lady Sovereign photographed by Alasdair McLellan. The cover’s “My England” treatment places the London rapper at the centre of an issue unusually rich in mid-2000s British music and youth-culture documentation. The contents describe Lady Sovereign’s rise from tower-block pirate radio to meetings with Jay-Z; elsewhere Jammer is presented in a grime feature and SAS appear in UK-hip-hop coverage. Features also include Pharrell Williams, Anna Dello Russo, Peter Saville and Kim Jones, alongside fashion, art and photography. The rear cover carries a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement. i-D later selected the Lady Sovereign image for retrospectives of notable covers.
Why this object matters
The Lady Sovereign/McLellan issue directly joins pirate-radio and grime emergence with Jammer, UK hip-hop and British design coverage. Retain Gold alongside i-D's Offspring issue and Dazed's early grime reporting. Its substantive contemporary network evidence matters more than retrospective cover selection; it does not require a premium over similarly rich original documents.
Evidence limits: No new physical inspection or collation was performed. Copy-specific conclusions remain limited to the retained catalogue and accession evidence.
Score and assessment method
Archive Importance: 9.1 / 10 · Gold Star.
This is a curatorial judgement, not a measurement accurate to one tenth or a market valuation. Read the explanation and its evidence limits together.
How Archive Importance is assessed →Inside this issue
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