Julia says Bowery, who started off working at Burger King to make ends meet, quickly became a fixture on the scene: “He was very influential because he was very inventive. “It was probably only once, but he made such an impact they have never forgotten it.” DJ Princess Julia met Bowery in the early 80s, both part of a crowd that included the artist Cerith Wyn Evans, Boy George, Clark, and Bowery’s friend and frequent co-star Trojan. “People are always telling me about the time they saw him,” says Sue Tilley, Bowery’s friend and the author of Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon.
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He turned himself, his body and his image into an art object, one that walked among us as well as appeared on stages and in the windows of galleries.īowery on The Clothes Show – watch on YouTube Asked what he most deplored in others by the Guardian in 1993, Bowery replied: “The urge to categorise: if you label me, you negate me.” Perhaps Boy George came up with the most accurate description when he described Bowery as “modern art on legs”. He was an art director on the 1991 video for Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, a stylist for Rifat Özbek, a costume designer for Culture Club (Boy George would co-write and star in a successful musical about Bowery). He appeared in a commercial for Pepe Jeans and guested on The Clothes Show on BBC One, taking tea in Harrods dressed in a succession of astonishing get-ups to the soundtrack of his hero, drag star Divine.īowery also engaged in more conventional creative work. On the back of the Freud connection, Bowery hit the mainstream from various directions. He fronted a band, Minty, and – perhaps most famously – modelled nude several times for Freud. He appeared in the windows of the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, wearing a different outfit each day of the week.
He worked with the dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, creating costumes and co-starring in his performances. (Although Bowery described himself as gay, he married his longtime companion and sometime lover Bateman seven months before his death.)īut Bowery’s creativity was not confined to clubs. And then there was his wife, Nicola Bateman, worn naked and strapped upside-down to his chest. There were the lightbulbs he’d wear on either side of his face, the coloured drips that would cover his bald head, the merkin he’d place over his genitals. There was the polka dot suit worn with polka dot face. There was the shiny PVC mask and matching catsuit, with one larger leg as if in plaster. As the impresario of Taboo, he wore a different, jaw-dropping outfit every week. What made him so different from the other 80s club kids? Partly his looks, which still seem strikingly original. Photograph: James Hill/RexĪs Sunshine Boy suggests, Bowery remains a larger-than-life persona in underground culture, even 24 years after his death. Umbilical sausages … Leigh Bowery ‘giving birth’ to his wife.
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