A yellow all-in-one jumpsuit, conical spikes protruding out of all angles. A black beret adorned with buttons, chains and keys. Gold leather trousers with an adjoining bag rhino-horning upwards from the crotch.
If you were a London club kid in the ’80s, it didn’t matter how impractically you dressed: if something was fabulous, you would wear it. This new exhibition from the Fashion and Textile Museum captures that lust for dressing up via an extensive collection of clothes, jewellery, photographs, magazines and memorabilia which came out of a specific corner of the city at a revolutionary time for fashion. The whole thing revolves around Leigh Bowery, the eccentric performance artist and designer, who arrived in London via Australia at the turn of the decade, and whose squat bedroom – complete with Star Trek wallpaper – we’re welcomed into at first instance. Here, we’re introduced to Bowery’s designs: his bold silhouettes, textural embellishments and playful motifs crop up throughout (be sure to look for the fantastic Kirby grip detailing, using rows and rows of hair clips to create a Chanel-adjacent, DIY tassel effect).
You’ll wonder how our wardrobes all got so homogenised and boring.
‘Taboo had a reputation as the wildest club in town’, a newsreader’s voice reads over a pixelated dance floor clip. 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. And this freedom checked out: head upstairs and you’ll see the window of Browns department store, who bought up the St Martin’s graduate collections of Galliano and Dean Bright alongside clips of Top of the Pops and Neneh Cherry’s brilliant monochromatic buttoned bra top designed by Judy Blame.
Sure, there are parts where the exhibition could do a better job at spelling out who’s who: often, names are mentioned in text with the assumption we’ll know who they are (spoiler: we’ve not all lived through the ’80s!), and some of the corresponding labelling of pieces was scatty and unclear. But overall, this is a triumph: it sums up eighties fashion as a time of high camp, DIY-led innovation, unashamed gaudiness and playful disregard for gender.
You’ll leave the exhibition wanting to dress better, more boldly, to embrace your own style and turn the saturation right up to the max. If you like clothes, you’ll love this.