Raised on a steady fantasy diet of Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle -- each packed with airbrushed models striking insouciant poses in unfathomably expensive clothes -- my discovery of i-D in London was an epiphany. Here was a magazine that was about fashion that was real. Unlike those picture-perfect glossies, i-D featured raw fashion from the street: photographs of normal people wearing their everyday clothes and looking not necessarily fabulous but, more important, unique.

The models in the book wore designer togs as if they were rags, mixing Helmut Lang with customized secondhand T-shirts and Top Shop trends. For the first time, opening a fashion magazine didn't make me feel like a cloddish troglodyte who needed fixing; i-D brought the heady world of fashion down to my level.

For the first time, I realized that fashion could have flaws.

	Portfolio Smile i-D A gallery of images from the book. Communiqué Follow the boucing glossy mag editors. Plus: Where have all the petticoats gone? By Janelle Brown Print story E-mail story

These days, i-D is hardly the only magazine that's pushing this vision of fashion. (And even in 1993, when I first discovered the magazine, i-D was competing with equally influential British magazines Dazed and Confused and the Face.) Avant-garde fashion rags now cram the magazine racks: Purple, Spoon, Flaunt, Surface, V, Jalouse, Big, Dutch, Visionaire, Index and so on. But i-D was one of the first -- when I discovered it, I was already 13 years late to the party -- and arguably the best, and continues to be the seminal and influential alternative fashion magazine.

The magazine launched in 1980 as a punk fanzine, the brainstorm of disaffected former Vogue art director Terry Jones. Twenty years later, Jones is still editor in chief and creative director of i-D; and the magazine has evolved from a lo-fi, low-budget project to a Time Out-owned glossy. In honor of the magazine's 20th anniversary and its 200th issue, Taschen has released the coffee-table book "Smile i-D," a dense and thrilling 600-page collection of images (plus a few words) from the past two decades of the magazine.

"Smile i-D" not only reproduces some of the most stunning styling and photography of the past 20 years but also documents the changing cultural zeitgeist of those times, as seen in the streets of London. If something was cool -- really cool -- it could be found in the pages of i-D before you'd find it anywhere else.

Take, for example, the opening spread of images from the first issue: a series of London punks, complete with fishnets and safety pins and spiky dos and shredded leather, photographed against a white backdrop. Three years later, it's a shocking-pink and snarling Madonna -- in her "Virgin" days -- winking on the cover and new wavers frolicking in off-the-shoulder fluorescent attire; followed swiftly by mods in their pinstripes and "cuties" in pastel androgynous frocks; moving on through rave, jungle, hip-hop and Britpop -- each cultural movement represented not just by its up-and-coming celebrities but also by its representatives on the sidewalks, in the suburbs, in clubs and bars.

Each on-the-street photo was (and still is) accompanied by a mini-interview -- a "journalistic approach to style," as Jones puts it -- and the subsequent "Smile i-D" collection of quotes offers a gritty, realistic and utterly unglamorous peek at the human relationship to clothing. (Quoth one punk, "The trousers I'm wearing are filthy. It's because I lie under my bike and get oil drips.")

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