On Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern
Notes on an exhibition.
Where to begin with Leigh Bowery? Fashion designer, maverick, muse, drag persona, club legend, aficionado of taste and the tasteless?
Currently the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern (27 Feb - 31 August 2025), Bowery was born in Sunshine, Australia, a Melbourne suburb too drab for Bowery’s stylistic vision. An accomplished musician and a talent with a sewing machine, Bowery came to London in 1980 and became a true legend of London nightlife, setting up his own club called Taboo in 1985 and dominating the scene with his unique outfits. Many of these are displayed here and take the Punk and New Romantic styles of the late twentieth century to their furthest extremes.
To call these looks extravagant seems patronising somehow, a put down; the exclamation mark in the exhibition’s title (‘Leigh Bowery!’) seems to suggest that when it comes to Bowery little other description is needed, or maybe even possible: it can only be Leigh Bowery!
This punctuating flourish is the first insight into the curatorial logic visible here: for the most part, the exhibition is hagiographic and, in many ways, Bowery’s outfits and influence certainly do deserve such proselytising efforts. You only need to tune into Drag Race to see the references are there every episode even if these are mostly voiced by the contestants rather than discernible in their looks.
His fashion genius was combining extreme angles and silhouettes with a whimsy that pivoted, in the swoop of a hemline, between beauty and disgust. Bowery’s fashion was unique because nobody else quite had the gall or gumption to create beautiful looks that were also disturbing and often offensive. Coco Chanel’s advice to take off one item before you head out never really applied to this committed maximalist whose fashions emphasised his own maximal comportment: a toweringly large figure, Bowery’s cuboid and spheroid shoulder pads, skirts or skin-tight day- and nightwear turned his body into a sculpture that shirked off with panache any expectations of the stationary.
To see Bowery’s looks at their best, though, you should almost avoid the now rather fusty-looking outfits displayed on the headless mannequins here and look more closely at the photographs by Fergus Greer taken in the late 1980s. To my mind, amid all the club toilet selfies and the postcards regaling cruising tales penned by Bowery from various locations in London and beyond, these are without doubt the strongest visual artefacts on display.
In these, Bowery is devastatingly chic, a bent wrist so sharp it’s cruel. In one of these images, Bowery wears a sleek black PVC body suit, his tongue peeking out of a gimp mask like a worm from a burrow. One leg is sveltely attired, the rubber giving way to high stiletto shoe; the other is tumescent, almost as wide as the appliance needed to clean up all the piss Bowery has aimed at the competition.
It seems revealing that the strongest ‘art’ here is not just Bowery’s work but Bowery captured by someone else as he is pulled into a position of apparent refinement. Greer’s gaze is elegant and Bowery’s maverick desire to disgust is sublimated somewhat into the recognisable poses of high fashion.
These photographs, though, are so far away from the real Bowery who could not stop supplementing his outfits with his equally wild antics: there is surprisingly little on display, for instance, about a significant performance in 1990 at The Fridge in Brixton, organised to raise money for AIDS initiatives, when Bowery sprayed his audience with water from his anus.
Always wanting to be a walking work of art, here Bowery became water feature; in the one photograph from the performance, the stream jets from Bowery’s arse with such gusto you’d be forgiven for thinking this fountain’s mechanics have malfunctioned.
His ass-inine waters were certainly not as healing as those on Helicon and the backlash was swift. Justified or not, an uproar followed and Bowery felt the performance a mistake; inevitably, he was banned from the club. Yet Bowery was always one to go too far and this experience didn’t stop his need to transgress at the expense of friendships and working relationships.
He fell out with the choreographer Michael Clark, perhaps his greatest artistic partner, in 1991 over a disagreement about costume design for Clark’s show mmm. For his role, Bowery designed an all-white suit with ‘CUNT’ inked on it. Clark thought it was too much but Bowery insisted and wore it without the former’s approval. As Clark memorably put it, this led to ‘a parting of the ways, between the cunt and the asshole’. Theirs was a split never quite reconciled and Bowery died only three years later from an AIDS illness.
From the history that is narrated on these walls, you get the sense that compromise wasn’t really in Bowery’s vocabulary until it was too late. Even his biography, written by close friend Sue Tilley which has been reprinted for the exhibition, is unable to convince us that Bowery was particularly sympathetic. Tilley, who like Bowery was a muse of painter Lucien Freud, is wise enough not to try and delude us about Bowery’s character. She knew how lascivious and cruel her friend could be and it’s there on the walls at Tate: his grandstanding, his blue humour, his attention-seeking.
This isn’t a complaint. Plenty of artists, plenty of originals, after all, are difficult, and Bowery was a shock that Thatcherite London desperately needed. But his personality and loose tongue have clearly been something of a curatorial challenge. How to offset the blazing creativity with the reality that Bowery was often nasty, sometimes racist, and drawn to controversy?
One wall text treads pretty carefully when it talks about the influence of South Asian fabrics on Bowery’s work, given his visits to nearby shops in east London where he lived, only to confirm the latent suspicion somewhat meekly that Bowery did use a slur to describe the people running these outlets. Another text also tells us Bowery performed in blackface until he was called out by friends; and Tilley’s biography, alongside Clark’s choreography for his New Puritans (1984), also reveals Bowery and his coterie to have incorporated Nazi symbols into their work. If a coherent politics seems lacking, it’s likely because this would have been a distraction from partying.
It’s sometimes hard to shake off the smell of redemption about the place and this is mostly at odds with the fact that Bowery’s appearances are so mediated by, and in such close proximity to, others, many of whom are still with us and are involved in the exhibition. From Greer’s photographs to the snapshots at Taboo, to footage of Bowery’s costumes in Clark’s performances made by Charles Atlas, Bowery could only really be Bowery because of other people and because of his place in the scene.
I came away, then, wondering whether this exhibition was not just a eulogy to Bowery but counterculture too. ‘Leigh Bowery!’: where is today’s Leigh Bowery? And what is today’s countercultural scene? Is today’s Bowery at Adonis, Riposte, perhaps another club night that pops up in an industrial estate every month or so leaving behind empty baggies and lube sachets but no art quite like Bowery’s?
It disappointed me somewhat to think about how similar the fashion was in the snapshots of the London ‘80s-90s clubs on the walls of the Tate Modern to those of today. Though I’m not exactly one to ‘serve looks’, as they say, the current queer cultural scene seems stuck trying to replicate Bowery and co, albeit with added mullets and mesh, and there doesn’t seem to be any real answer to Bowery’s legacy: no one that I’ve seen, or as far as I’m aware, is going beyond what Bowery did, is responding to today’s moment with quite that level of countercultural attack. Sure, there are drag acts working today that are committed to pushing the boat out which are much more politically versed and inspired than Bowery and Clark ever really were, but in terms of style and performance, is anyone outdoing Bowery?
I refuse to think that today’s Bowery is somewhere in Hackney or east London where Bowery resided. The places where Bowery flourished are now so gentrified they are virtually homogenous, their streets occupied by wine bars with names so zany you feel as if you need to use a toothpick after saying them.
To do the kinds of things Bowery did today—buy fabrics, make your own fashion line, start your own club or club night—you need money and this now means the kind that is inherited. Perhaps today’s counterculture is off-grid and undetectable to the public eye, in zines even, returning to print culture. I’m wary that I might be proving myself to be out of the loop, too mainstream for my own good, but I’m genuinely eager to know what a contemporary analogue might be, whether the idea of an analogue between those days and now is even helpful.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it were offline: completely avoiding the online world would perhaps be the most radical thing possible in today’s climate of constant self-promotion and visual production. But this is also why Bowery continues to resonate: his ego-driven, uncompromising aesthetic finds purchase in today’s times of cultural nihilism and aesthetic malaise where being creative is fast becoming unaffordable and AI promises a flow of uncanny slop. I’d much prefer to be sprayed in Bowery’s assy water than consume the latter.
How many Instagram followers would today’s Bowery need to have in order to get on the BBC just to show off an outfit? Back then, all Bowery needed to do was take a walk. If I sound worryingly nostalgic for those times, I should clarify that it’s not for all their abject suffering but for a creative economy where such renegade work was funded by the Arts Council.
But before my specs get too rose-tinted, a final thought: Bowery would surely have loved such veneration of his handiwork but is its ready institutionalisation a sign of his counterculture’s failure? Do all countercultures move quite so adeptly into the mainstream? And when they do, for how much longer are they radical? In this context, Bowery’s work was looking dangerously historic, a link in a genealogical chain its queerness would otherwise baulk at. At the very least, Bowery would certainly have been judging his visitors’ outfits: as doorman to his own exhibition, he probably wouldn’t let anyone in.