OUTLAWS: Fashion Renegades Of Leigh Bowery’s 1980s London
Punk. That burst of angry, youthful energy unleashed on London streets in 1976 indelibly changed the trajectory of nightclubbing forever. For about eighteen months, sartorial individuality reigned for those initial participants. Although Westwood and McLaren’s SEX and Seditionaires boutique provided expensive garments infused with the spikily subversiveness forever associated with punk, DIY styling rose like a rocket within those months with a slew of customization ideas utilized to express disaffection, nihilism and sexual deviation.
But it would not last. Punk quickly became a uniform (black leather jacket, choppy hair, etc.) and the promise of a fabulously individualistic future faded by 1978. One of the disappointed, the illustratively named Steve Strange, and his friend DJ Rusty Egan, decided to do something about it by starting a “Bowie Night”, every Tuesday, at a tiny club in seedy Soho called Billy’s in the autumn of that year.
Billy’s brought back the individuality craved by its denizens. The scene grew and moved to Blitz wine bar in Covent Garden after a year, becoming an incubator for the creative movers and shakers who would shape the following decade. The sartorial one upmanship reached stratospheric heights when hundred year old costumier Charles Fox closed its doors in 1980, selling off its stock for pennies on the pound. The press became enthralled by the peacockery, dubbing them the New Romantics, a title they hated. But the die had been cast and the club kid was born.
Leigh Bowery got wind of nocturnal London’s colorful characters and decided to up sticks to the English capital from Sunshine, Australia in 1980. i-D, The Face and Blitz were all born that same year, putting the party participants on their covers. It would be seven years before Bowery would land the cover of i-D, but he would grace their pages as early as 1983.
Although the flounces and bows associated with the New Romantic look all but disappeared by the end of 1981, extreme sartorial expressions did not. Cha Cha, which opened in ‘81 in the back of Heaven, Europe’s largest gay disco, was hosted by angular Blitz habutée Scarlett Cannon and future stylist extraordinaire Judy Blame. Cha Cha would be Bowery’s entré into café society, confirming his desire for outlandish presentation. Philip Sallon, whose flamboyant appearance pre-dated punk, hosted the wildly successful Mud Club in 1983, providing a more legitimate space for the exotically clad. That same year, Bowery began to make waves on the nightclub scene as a blue faced spectacle in stripy tights and ass revealing jacket.
Bowery launched his own club night, Taboo, in 1985. Initially sluggish, it exploded after a few months, becoming the hottest and most difficult club to gain access to if you were not dressed to the nines. Its run was brief, about a year, brought down by drug use and deaths. But at its peak, it was the most colorful playground of stylistic expression London had ever seen. And what did they wear? Perhaps a jacket trimmed in bobby pins or a pair of frilly underwear as designed by Bowery himself? Or maybe John Crancher’s white maxi coat with bondage straps or Bodymap’s stretchy, stripy jerseys. Dean Bright’s sumptuously velvet creations as worn by singer Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive in their video for “You Spin Me Round” might have gotten you past Marc Vaultier, Taboo’s notorious doorman. It could have been one of Pam Hogg’s color blocked, body skimming catsuits designed to make one look like a futuristic Emma Peel. Maybe a Christopher Nemeth jacket upcycled from old mail sacks, topped off with one of Judy Blame’s berets festooned with buttons and ribbons. A John Galliano jacket from his Ludic Game collection, abbreviated to barely there proportions? Stephen Linard’s biker jacket in orange and black faux tiger fur would have looked good on the amyl scented dancefloor. One of Richard Torry’s ingeniously laddered knitwear pieces would have surely done the trick. Whatever it was, it has found a commemorative document in Outlaws.
Martin Green and NJ Stevenson’s Outlaws: Fashion Renegades Of Leigh Bowery’s 1980s London captures that era’s exciting London club scene. It is a photographic catalogue showcasing the unbridled creative spirit and wiggy, wayward glamour of that era. It also resurrects the names of a few forgotten but undeniably talented creators like John Flett, who invented a new bias cutting technique which infused his garments with a liquid languidness, and Elmaz Hüseyin, who created the clothing for pop group ABC when they reinvented themselves as clubtastic cartoons in 1984. The book closes with “The Afterparty”, a profile of some of the original participants, their sartorial innovativeness intact after decades, a touching way to honor the people who made the styles, and the party, happen.
Outlaws: Fashion Renegades Of Leigh Bowery’s 1980s London
208 Pages, 81/2 x 14 ¼ inches 200 color illustrations
Published by SCALA ($50.00), out now.
All images courtesy of the publisher
