A thrilling confluence of fashion and creativity occurred in the form of Leigh Bowery, a performance artist who was also a designer, nightclub host, and band front man. Born in 1961 in Sunshine, Australia, he loved fashion from the age of fourteen, when his mother taught him to knit and crochet while he convalesced after an operation. He studied design at the Melbourne Institute of Technology before heading for London in 1980 at nineteen. There he would fulfill some of his unique dreams and along the way inspire others to live theirs, too.
Bowery started making clothes to go out and get noticed in, and he soon became part of the New Romantic underground nightlife of the time. Even in a milieu where dressing up as a nun or a pirate, an eighteenth-century courtesan, or wild-west cowboy was commonplace, he was determined to stand out. In 1985, Bowery launched his own club, Taboo, where patrons were encouraged to dress up with abandon; his outfits were always the most avant-garde. When he traveled he wore equally outrageous outfits. The filmmaker Charles Atlas, who produced a film called The Legend of Leigh Bowery, said on NPR in November 2003, “I went out with him many times at night in New York in winter, and he would have on a big padded bra covered with hairpins. And then on his head he wore this beautiful beaded bug mask with fringe coming down from the eyes so you couldn’t really see his face. And then he wore matching boots and what he called a merkin, a pubic wig. And he, of course, stopped people on the street dead in their tracks.”
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Leigh Bowery wears a one-off ensemble of his own creation, London, c. 1980.
Art was the natural step forward for Bowery’s artistic vision which disrupted, refracted, and melded concepts of gender and sexuality: he blurred and recalibrated his own identity in an era when this was out of step with the norm. Among his most startling and influential performances was one in 1992 at the in London nightclub Kinky Gerlinky, where he gave his first “birth scene” enactment, “delivering” his future wife, Nicola Bateman, who was covered in red paint and KY jelly. The couple would perform the same enactment the next year at Wigstock, which took place in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, and elsewhere. Way back in 1981, Bowery had worked out his art-life philosophy: the exchange of ideas must happen by any means necessary. “I think that firstly, individuality is important, and there should be no main rules for behaviour and appearance,” he wrote in his diary.
Bowery was one of artist Lucian Freud’s most famous sitters. When he was asked to dress the ballet dancer Michael Clarke and his company for a show, Bowery wanted to clothe them in costumes made from Freud’s paint rags.
Bowery loved to experiment with makeup, beginning with polka dots in his early career (see here) to increasingly extreme methods of altering his appearance later on.
Bowery considered his art-looks—“both serious and very funny,” according to the journalist Ian Parker, who interviewed him for the Independent in 1995. “It’s decorative, but there’s something underlying that’s maybe tragic and disturbing. There’s a tension between the two.” Bowery’s heart was not in mainstream fashion, although by 1982 his clothes were being stocked in Susanne Bartsch’s eponymous boutique on Thompson Street in New York and the next year were part of her New London–New York fashion show. The designer Michael Costiff says in Atlas’s film: “Leigh didn’t really want anyone else wearing his clothes; he was his own best creation.” In a 1986 interview with The Cut, Bowery said: “Fashion’s a little bit of a problem for me, because you have to appeal to so many people, and I like appealing to maybe one or two. . . . I’m only interested in maybe twenty people’s opinion of me.” On the Joan Rivers Show in 1993, he reiterated his stance, saying, “I don’t think it’s so much about fashion, it’s more about expressing ideas and having fantasies and making them all happen. It’s about looking different and being subversive.”
I believe that fashion (where all the girls have clear skin, blue eyes, blond blow-waved hair, and a British size 10 and where all men have clear skin, mustaches, short blow-waved hair and masculine physique and appearance) STINKS.
—Leigh Bowery, diary entry, 1981
In October 1988 Bowery was given his own installation show at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London, where he sat on a chaise longue behind a one-way mirror—he was not able to see out, but visitors could watch him. He lay there for a week; passing traffic was the soundtrack. According to Artscribe International, as quoted in Sue Tilley’s book, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon, “It was fashion slowed down, collapsed into performance. The designer making clothes for himself that became more and more obsessive.” Tilley, who was Bowery’s best friend, said, “He would make what he wanted to make and whether people liked it or not was their business. It didn’t matter to him as he wasn’t trying to sell the clothes anyway.”
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Alexander McQueen’s Horn of Plenty collection for Fall 2009 featured models with oversized lips and makeup suggestive of Leigh Bowery’s in the 1980s.
Bowery was big news in the fashion world, however, and is still revered by the edgiest talents. The blue faces and exotic Indian jewelry worn by models in John Galliano’s spring 2003 show were directly inspired by one of Bowery’s famous looks, and Alexander McQueen’s 2009 Horn of Plenty collection featured exaggerated silhouettes and oversized red lips that evoked Bowery at his finest. Also in that year, Maison Margiela featured pom-pom heads and balding head masks that dripped with paint, another Bowery signature. In 1993, just before Bowery died of an AIDS-related illness, Annie Leibovitz photographed him encased in his fabulous clubfooted S&M catsuit—a moment to which Gareth Pugh’s black latex head-to-toe bodies from his 2007 collection pay homage.
Bowery’s first job when he came to England was at a Burger King in London’s West End. The cash-poor aspiring artist said his dream was to work at the branch on Paris’s Champs-Élysées.
And there are more recent tributes. A video portrait of Bowery was displayed at the Fondazione Prada’s permanent exhibition space’s Nord Gallery in Milan, during the In Part show of May 2015. And Rick Owens caused a sensation in 2016 with his “human backpacks” on the catwalk that summer—they were based on Bowery’s “birth” installation, and the slings worn by the models exactly replicated the ones Bateman had been tethered with. As Owens remarked in a Dazed Digital interview, the concept “was transgressive and sweet at the same time.”