Leigh Bowery: London’s Underground Performer and Designer

The icon who inspired some of the greatest designers, from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen.

In the early 1980s in London-England, clubs such as the Blitz, served as a unique testing ground for young artists (Hutton 1). Australian native Leigh Bowery was known in the art world as a man with outrageous looks consisting of primary colours — mastering the art of perspective and illusion with one’s body.

Bowery is a fashion icon, who inspired some of the greatest designers, from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen. He was also the muse of painter Lucian Freud, who made many portraits of him. However, to others he remains a controversial public figure.

Bowery’s performances were flamboyant, sometimes controversial spectacles in the public space. Some considered his fashion and performance art fundamentally ground-breaking or on the contrary, visually disturbing and controversial (Rimmer 83).

In the Birth Scenes, Bowery camps labour as a ‘hysterical body that can’t’ reproduce or conform to the limits of heteronormativity and consumer culture; his new body was beyond the bounds of reproductive futurism (Kristen 197).