From Alexander McQueen’s sex-doll lips to Charles Jeffrey’s club-catwalk fusions, the taboo icon has left one sticky stain on the fashion industry
During a performance at an AIDS benefit in the early 90s, Leigh Bowery turned his back to the audience, bent over, and let rip, spraying the content of his bowels over an unwitting front row. While spectators were left splattered in fresh enema, and understandably disgusted, Bowery simply shrugged it off: “If I have to ask if this idea is too sick, I know I’m on the right track,” he said of the scatalogical showering.
It was just another day at the office for Bowery, the multi-hyphenate creative famed for monstrously flamboyant looks and controversial performance art. Hailing from a sleepy Melbourne suburb called Sunshine, Bowery first came to London in 1980 where, after a short-lived stint working at Burger King, he made his name on the underground club circuit. Between nights at Heaven, Asylum, and his own lurid venture, Taboo, Bowery began to radicalise his appearance, dressing his hulking 6’1 frame in gimp masks, towering platforms, and ratty pubic wigs. Equal parts genius, comic, and terrifying, Bowery would charge around these dingy Soho haunts in a host of blown-up creations, like Mr. Blobby on gak.
He’d carve holes in his cheeks for safety-pin piercings, gaffer tape his flesh into impossibly feminine silhouettes, and drip his bald pate in hot glue. It was provocative to the point of perverse, a total theatricalisation of the self. In the daytime though, Bowery designed costumes for Culture Club and Michael Clark’s dance company and dabbled in art direction for Massive Attack. He was the unlikely but brilliant star of a Pepe Jeans campaign and, having turned his natural exhibitionism into a live-in exhibit at London’s Anthony D’Offay gallery, became Lucian Freud’s muse and the subject of the late painter’s nude series.
In 1994, Bowery passed away from AIDS-related complications, just as combination therapies were beginning to prolong the lives of those living with HIV. And while he would’ve made the dream Big Brother contestant or Good Morning Britain pundit, his shocking turns continue to leave a stink on the runways of today. Below, we take a look at the indelible mark Bowery left on fashion.
ALEXANDER MCQUEEN
In 1994, Bowery’s drag band Minty gave weekly performances at Freedom in Soho, attracting a wide gamut of club kids, art students, and bewildered punters – among them, a young Lee McQueen. It was a fleeting residency, however, soon axed by the club’s outraged owners after Bowery puked up vegetable soup into his bandmate’s mouth – although Bowery was allegedly “thrilled to bits” that his stunts had caused such revulsion.
Nevertheless, McQueen was clearly left inspired. As part of his AW09 show, the now iconic Horn of Plenty, models were sent out alabaster pale with lacquered, oversized, sex-doll lips. It didn’t just gesture to Bowery, but lifted directly from the artist’s trademark visage and overdrawn, clownish mug. It makes sense as to why – for both Bowery and McQueen, the body was a site of transgression and their respective designs always teased the borders of human repulsion. These cartoonish lips served as the intermediary between the glamourous and the grotesque.
RICK OWENS
Rick Owens’ SS16 show featured models with gymnasts strapped and harnessed to their bodies. It was shocking to watch then, and even more shocking back in the mid 90s when Bowery did the same thing during his birthing performance. It was part of a routine where Bowery would bound onto the stage, bulging in a floral print jacket and balaclava, spread his legs, and simulate childbirth. After a few minutes of shrieking and shuddering, out came his partner, who had been strapped beneath Bowery’s coat, smeared in red and brown fluids.
In an interview with The New York Times, Owens did admit that an Annie Liebowitz portrait of Bowery, which displayed the inner mechanisms of this performance, had inspired the show. Owens was also accused of appropriation by the New York-based dance company, FLUCT, who had choreographed support gymnasts in a similar way. However, Owens politely suggested that “they might be overestimating my awareness or maybe overestimating their visibility. I think we both knocked off Leigh Bowery”.
CHARLES JEFFREY
While there are obvious references to the Aussie art-provocateur in Charles Jeffrey’s work – colourful face paint, the theatricality of his shows – it’s the sociality behind a LOVERBOY collection (the way that queer nightlife is transposed onto clothing) that is most reminiscent of Bowery.
Both Jeffrey and Bowery’s designs blur the borders between club and catwalk. Despite studying fashion and staging shows, Bowery only ever made pieces for himself. Every week he would descend on London’s queer clubs, debuting his latest and most outlandish designs. Similarly, LOVERBOY started out as a club night at Vogue Fabrics in Dalston, which emphasised dressing-up, flamboyance, and genderplay. So the ways both individuals produce fashion draw upon queer clubland, its sense of resistance, and transformative possibilities. It’s something which also connects to the queer practice behind Hood By Air, which appears to be referencing Bowery’s masks in its upcoming collection, too.
GARETH PUGH
In a 2007 interview with Icon magazine, Gareth Pugh describes any comparisons made to Leigh Bowery as “lazy journalism”. That being said, he also told The Guardian in 2018 that the “iconic” Bowery was a constant reference, stating that the artist had “created his own language” of design.
Clearly, there is a relationship between Bowery and the ever-so-reluctant Pugh. This is particularly prominent in SS07, when Pugh styled his pieces with rubberised S&M gimp suits and high-flung ponytails, which evoked Bowery’s iconic equine-kink creations, as lensed by Fergus Greer. The most famous of these confections is a club-footed black cat-suit which covered Bowery’s entire body, spare a small pin hole at the mouth to breathe through. And this was undeniably echoed in Pugh’s ‘07 offering. Granted, Pugh’s inspiration for these looks may have come via McQueen, or Galliano, or Owens, but they all link back to the twisted fetish club look which, without Bowery, may not exist.
RICHARD QUINN
The most recent of Bowery’s predecessors is, without a doubt, Richard Quinn. Full body chintzy prints, PVC undergarments, and zip-through balaclavas all nod to Bowery’s revolting sexual energy. Quinn has said that his designs originally took inspiration from the upholstered figures of artist Paul Harris. However, since his most recent collections have been cut through with striking references to S&M, it’s difficult to disentangle the image of Bowery from a Richard Quinn collection.
In a rare clip from a 1988 episode of BBC One’s The Clothes Show, Bowery takes us on a trip to Harrods, where he dines at The Georgian and twirls about in 50s housewife gowns and gimp masks blasted in kitschy floral prints and dalmatian spots. These are louche looks, which seem to parody the uppity fashions of the Harrods clientele. But they could just as easily be sent out as part of a Richard Quinn show, only to turn up vicariously on the backs of a Jenner-Kardashian a few months later.
MARTIN MARGIELA
As Bowery continued to push the limits of the body and soft-sculpture in the 90s, his designs became increasingly bulbous and indiscernibly human. One particular example is a puff-cum-dandelion headdress which had been fashioned from layers of tulle, obscuring Bowery’s face altogether. The same head piece appeared in Margiela’s SS09 collection. Similarly, Bowery’s glue-dribbled head has also made an appearance in Margiela, working the look into crystalised balaclava.
These are tit-bits of Bowery’s legacy, which Margiela weaves into its own freakish universe, creating looks which are thoroughly familiar but ultimately unsettling. It’s reminiscent of Junya Watanabe, who has also referenced Bowery’s image sporadically throughout his career for a darkening effect – AW06 had distressed PVC head coverings and AW09 employed Bowery’s Matisse-style shadowed make-up.
SUPREME
There’s very little that Supreme won’t emblazon it’s logo across - fire hydrants, nunchucks, Louis Vuitton – and in 2020, it was Leigh Bowery who got the hypebeast seal of approval. With an undisclosed proportion of the proceeds going to Visual AIDS (a New York-based charity), it was testament to the enduring and universal impact of Bowery’s image. Even without background, decontextualised on a hoodie, or photo-printed onto a t-shirt, Bowery’s arresting attempts at self-curation have become covetable, cultural icons in their own right.