“Dress as though your life depends on it or don’t bother!”
That was the mantra of the ultimate dressing-up queen, Leigh Bowery - and it was he and his circle of misfits and remarkable creatives around which the simply faboo exhibition Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London [that Our Sal, Hils, Crog, Madam Acarti and I trolled off to see at Zandra Rhodes' Fashion & Textile Museum in Bermondsey on Sunday afternoon] revolved.
With most of us being true "children of the '80s", it was practically compulsory!
Although "my era" - the New Romantics of the early '80s, epitomised by the likes of Steve Strange, Spandau Ballet, Marc Almond/Soft Cell, Human League, Duran Duran and Depeche Mode - had led the way, and peaked, a little earlier than when Leigh Bowery's Taboo club and all that came with it were scandalising the streets and the tabloids alike, the style, the home-made, vintage, recycled "looks" on show were all-too-familiar. And I loved it!
From TimeOut:
Taboo, the short-lived nightclub on a corner of Leicester Square, swiftly became a home for Leigh and other noted creatives – like Boy George, John Galliano and Pam Hogg – to dance, indulge and, most importantly, dress up. The dance floor is replicated next door, a crowd of mannequins dressed in all manner of get-ups posing under one glittering disco ball. There are some terrific clothes here, stuff that stops you in your tracks because it is so bizarre or inventive (it’s hard to miss David Cabaret’s pin-stripped bulbous catsuit, also shown in a blown-up photograph of him wearing it on a Wednesday night Heaven at the end of the show). You’ll wonder how our wardrobes all got so homogenised and boring.
But it’s not just a case of ‘ooh-ing’ and ‘ah-ing’ at the clothes. What this exhibition does so well is situate the pieces in the wider context of London as a global creative hotspot. A sprawling timeline sketches out the socio-economic context, detailing how the availability of squat housing coupled with free higher education and market culture helped to pave the way for the creativity of the decade, against the backdrop of Thatcher’s rise to power and the introduction of Clause 28. Not yet constrained by capitalist pressures, these creatives could experiment, innovate, be silly and make clothes purely for their own pleasure.
The whole thing was simply boggling - the fact that the majority of items on show weren't behind glass, allowing a really close view of original clothes not just worn by the clubbers themselves, not just those designed, made and sold by designers such as Pam Hogg, Rachel Auburn, BodyMap, Red or Dead, John Galliano and Stephen Linard (largely at Kensington Market), but also outfits that were worn and popularised by the likes of Neneh Cherry, Kim Wilde, Martin Fry of ABC, Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive, Marc Almond, Lana Pellay, Maggie De Monde of Scarlet Fantastic, Alannah Currie of Thompson Twins, Mark Moore of S-Express, Bros and (of course) Boy George!
It took co-curator Martin Green (himself a former club kid) two years to track down the clothes for the exhibition.
This was a brilliantly dazzling show of creativity [sometimes poignant, given that all this hedonism took place just as the AIDS era was making a massive impact upon the gay scene at the time; indeed many of the labels crediting the visionaries behind the designs revealed the salutary information that many of them died in their early 30s, Leigh Bowery among them] that was not only an eye-opener, but gave me (and our gang) a shudder of nostalgic memories.
I'm incredibly happy we got to see this before it closed!
...and, speaking of Taboo, here's one of its regulars with his/her one big hit, filmed at that very club:
[click any pic to embiggen]
