Nick Kamen – man of the moment

Nick Kamen, the ridiculously good-looking former model and singer, who has just died, was in the mid 1980s the most famous man in London as his launderette advert stripping off his Levi jeans to Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard it on the Grapevine’ thrust him into the limelight. It boosted Levi’s sales by 800%, made boxer shorts fashionable again and him a global sex symbol. He became the icon of the moment when consumerism became fashionable and youth culture commodified – a