Leigh Bowery, ph. Nick Knight

Leigh Bowery was an Australian performance artist, club promoter, actor, pop star, model, and fashion designer, based in London. He is considered one of the more influential figures in the 1980s and 1990s London and New York City art and fashion circles influencing a generation of artists and designers. His influence reached through the fashion, club and art worlds to impact, amongst others, Meadham Kirchhoff, Alexander McQueen, Lucian Freud, Vivienne Westwood, Boy George, Antony and the Johnsons, John Galliano, the Scissor Sisters, David LaChapelle, Lady Bunny plus numerous Nu-Rave bands and nightclubs in London and New York City which arguably perpetuated his avant garde ideas.

Leigh Bowery inspired them all:

Fashion Designers

Trojan & Leigh Bowery – Junya watanabe

 Junya Watanabe

Junya Watanabe

 Junya Watanabe

Leigh Bowery – Maison Martin Margiela

Maison Martin Margiela

Maison Martin Margiela 

Maison Martin Margiela

Leigh Bowery – Maison Martin Margiela

Leigh Bowery – Gareth Pugh

 Gareth Pugh 

Gareth Pugh

 Artists

Boy George 

Beth Ditto

Lucian Freuds Paintings

Books

 Leigh Bowery

With the Australian artist Leigh Bowery (1961-1994), this catalog devotes itself to one of the most colourful border crossers of the London club, fashion, and art scene of the 1980s and 1990s. Bowery made his sexuality a means of aesthetic expression, and he consciously used his own body in his excessive abundance as an artistic media. His costumes, masquerades, and travesties investigate the concepts of fashion and the body at the boundaries to the most diverse social fields. Bowery employs his own physical bulkiness as the starting point of an extroverted body cult in which the concepts of ugliness and beauty, social standardisation and border crossings intersect. The result was an art figure which influenced in various areas. Bowery thus inspired Lucian Freud to one of his most fascinating nude paintings.He was discovered by the London art dealer Anthony d’Offay in 1988 and this was the start of a cooperation with the Photographer Fergus Greer who would accompany him until his early death in 1994 resulting from an HIV infection.

Editor: Kunstverein Hannover, René Zechlin, Ute Stuffer
Artists: Leigh Bowery

http://www.artbooksheidelberg.com/html/detail/en/leigh-bowery-978-3-86828-033-3.html

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Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon

The definitive biography of one of modern art’s most provocative vanguards Leigh Bowery was one of the most controversial and avant-garde performers of his generation. In this fascinating biography, author Sue Tilley, one of Bowery’s closest friends, lays bare the extravagant life of the trendsetting entertainer. From Bowery’s groundbreaking costumes and performance art, to his notoriety in London’s 1980s nightclub culture, to his role as a favored model for painter Lucian Freud, Tilley’s engrossing portrait offers insight into the outrageous world of 1980s modern art and the man who came to embody it. This ebook features a new postscript by Sue Tilley and an illustrated biography including rare photos from the author’s personal collection.

http://www.amazon.com/Leigh-Bowery-Life-Times-Icon/dp/0340693118

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Leigh Bowery Looks

Leigh Bowery is back. In just a few years, Leigh Bowery Looks rose to the status of being the definitive and indispensible guide to the unique looks designed and, in these photographs, worn by Bowery. This paperback version shows one of Britain’s most heroically ambitious yet underappreciated designers and performance artists. Bowery remains an inspiration to many contemporary fashion designers, though few are willing to admit it. Leigh Bowery Looks contains 300 photographs of Bowery–an extraordinary body of work that was the outcome of his collaboration with British photographer Fergus Greer between 1988 and 1994, the year of Bowery’s death. Here the range of Bowery’s many looks is most evident, as are the ways in which he has influenced the world of fashion today.

http://www.violetteeditions.com/books/previously_published/Leigh_Bowery_Looks.html

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Leigh Bowery

http://www.violetteeditions.com/books/previously_published/Leigh_Bowery.html

Leigh Bowery, ph. Ole Christiansen

leigh Bowery, ph. Fergus Greer, Novenber 1988

My friend Eddy (De Clercq) has shared many memories with me about his famous club RoXY in Amsterdam, my favorite hangout for years. Some of the memories involve Leigh Bowery, artist, dancer, designer, creator of nightclub Taboo  and professional provocateur.

Curious about this man, his amazing creations and stage performances, I found a documentary called The Legend of Leigh Bowery, which contains footage Eddy told me about, like the act The Birth and the weird wigs Leigh wore as daywear…

Leigh Bowery with assistant Nicola Bateman, ph. Fergus Greer

Short Biography

Leigh Bowery  was an Australian performance artist, club promoter, actor, pop star, model, and fashion designer, based in London. Bowery is considered one of the more influential figures in the 1980s and 1990s London and New York City art and fashion circles influencing a generation of artists and designers. His influence reached through the fashion, club and art worlds to impact, amongst others, Meadham Kirchhoff, Alexander McQueen, Lucian Freud, Vivienne Westwood, Boy George, Antony and the Johnsons,  John Galliano, the Scissor Sisters, David LaChapelle, Lady Bunny plus numerous Nu-Rave bands and nightclubs in London and New York City which arguably perpetuated his avant-garde ideas.

From a young age, Leigh Bowery (born 26 March 1961) felt alienated from his conservative surroundings. He first learned about London and the New Romantic scene through British fashion magazines. 

Leigh Bowery in I-D magazine

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Leigh moved to London for good in 1980, after taking a fashion course in high school. He became a known fixture at local clubs, in part for wearing outlandish outfits of his own design. 

In London, he soon befriended fellow clubbers Guy Barnes (known as Trojan) and David Walls. The three men moved in together, and Leigh outfitted his friends in his creative designs. The trio became known on the London club scene as the “Three Kings.”

Leigh found some success as a designer, showing several collections at the London Fashion Week show, as well as in New York and Tokyo. He was best known, however, as a club promoter and London nightlife fixture. In 1985, he opened the disco club nightclub Taboo. Originally an underground party, Taboo quickly became London’s answer to Studio 54. Taboo was known for its defiance of sexual convention, and its embrace of what Leigh called “polysexual” identities.

Leigh Bowery in Face magazine, ph. Nick Knight

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In addition to his club activities, Leigh participated in performance art and was well-connected within the art and theater circles of London. He often performed in face paint, lurex clothing and masks, relishing the opportunity to shock and flout convention whenever possible. He also served as a model, posing nude for some of Lucien Freud’s later portraits.

Leigh Bowery, who had identified as gay for many years, married his friend, Nicola Bateman (something to do with papers he needed), in May 1994. Only a few close friends were aware that Leigh had contracted AIDS before his death from AIDS-related illness, which occurred in London on New Year’s Eve in 1994, seven months after his marriage.

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 Leigh Bowery Series by Fergus Greer

 

THE LEGEND OF LEIGH BOWERY (2002)

Leigh Bowery: indisputably an embodiment of the 1980’s club scene in London and a provocative influence for a generation of artists.  The creator of Taboo – in more ways than the infamous nightclub – injects an outrageousness that inspired Boy George, Damien Hirst, Rifat Ozbek… the list goes on. The list is topped off with Charles Atlas, the man behind the camera for this amazing documentary

The documentary is also named in the Top Ten Cult Fashion Documentaries of Dazed & Confused magazine…. (http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/16863/1/top-ten-cult-fashion-documentaries)

 

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Info: http://www.biography.com/people/leigh-bowery-20943343#early-life

Anita Pallenberg (born 6 April 1944) ) is an Italian-born actress, model, and fashion designer, who is mostly known for being a Muse the Rolling Stones.

Short Biography

Young Anita became fluent in four languages, studied medicine, picture restoration and graphic design. At 21 she met Brian Jones (an original Rolling Stone) in Munich, where she was working on a modelling assignment. After a relationship of only two years Anita could no longer deal with his drug abuse. She had become Brian’s ‘full-time geisha, flatterer, punchbag – whatever he imagined, including partaker in orgies, which Anita always resolutely refused to do. 

Anita & Brian

Brian & Anita had become almost identical in style of hair and clothes

Keith Richards later said he had to rescue Anita from Brian, because they were both on a very destructive course. It happened  during a road trip to Morocco. Brian sensed something had happened between Anita and Keith and became violent to his girlfriend again. In the end she and Keith fled from Morocco and set up home in St John’s Wood, North London.

Anita and Keith together had three children: son Marlon Leon Sundeep (born 10 August 1969), daughter Angela (her middle name, which she chose to go by after initially being named and called Dandelion by her parents), born 17 April 1972), and a second son, Tara Jo Jo Gunne (26 March – 6 June 1976), who died in his cot 10 weeks after birth.

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Anita & Keith

 In 1979, a 17-year-old boy, Scott Cantrell, shot himself in the head with a gun owned by Keith, while in Anita’s bed, at the New York house shared by Keith and her. The boy had been employed as a part-time groundskeeper at the estate and was involved in a sexual relationship with Anita. Keith was in Paris recording with the Rolling Stones, but his son was at the house when the teen killed himself. Anita was arrested; however, the death was ruled a suicide in 1980, despite rumours that she and Scott had been playing a game of Russian roulette. The police investigation stated that she was not in the room or on the same floor of the house at the time the fatal shot was fired.

Keith later declared she shared his addiction to heroin and he wanted to clean up, but had to do it without Anita. Therefore he couldn’t stay with her, she would be a huge trigger for him. In 1981, after they had split up, Keith stated that he still loved Anita and saw her as much as he ever did, although he had already met his future wife Patti Hansen.

Anita Pallenberg, Bohemian Style

 Anita studied fashion design as a mature student at Central Saint Martins in London; she graduated in 1994. After she divided her time between New York City and Europe, and sporadically appeared in public as a party DJ. She also had a clothes collection.

Anita, now 70, has retired and shares a farmhouse in Sussex with son Marlon and acts as caretaker to Keith Richards’s Redlands estate while he is out of the country in tax exile.

Marlon & Anita

Interview  

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 Movies

Anita Pallenberg appeared in more than a dozen films over a forty-year span. Most notably, she appeared as The Great Tyrant in Roger Vadim’s cult-classic sci-fi film Barbarella, and as the sleeper wife of Michel Piccoli in the film Dillinger Is Dead, directed by Marco Ferreri. She had a small part in Volker Schlöndorff’s Michael Kohlhaas – der Rebell which was filmed in Slovakia in 1969 and the 1970 avant-garde Performance in which she played the role of Pherber (actually filmed in 1968 but not released for two years). She co-wrote the script to  with Donald Cammell, but had no intention of playing in the movie. She ended up replacing the original actress at the last-minute due to a medical emergency.

Barbarella

Anita Pallenberg as the Great Tyrant in Barbarella : ‘Hello Pretty, Pretty…..’

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Performance 

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Anita Pallenberg, Fashion Icon

Maddie Daisy Dixon as Anita Pallenberg, Lovecat Magazine 

photography: Sybil Steele / styling: Marisa Sidoti

Sometimes I have to ‘disappear’ a day and lose myself in another world to get inspired. Yesterday was one of those days and this time I choose the world of Kate Bush. I read a lot about her, watched many of her music video’s and found a BBC documentary I’d like to share. 

The first time I saw the Wuthering Heights video in 1978 was a mesmerizing moment. What I didn’t realise then, was the genius of Kate Bush, who wrote the beautiful song The Man With The Child In His Eyes when she was 13 and recorded it at the age of 16! She became famous at 19 and was solely responsable for her music, her way of dancing and her looks…… 

Very young Kate Bush, stylish already

Kate Bush became one of music’s most influential women. Her tales of dashing heroes & heroines, sung in her trademark voice, marked Kate out as very different from the rest of the pop crowd.

Her appearance was another trademark, the wild auburn hair was bohemian, always curly or crimped, her wide-eyed expression was achieved with black liner around her eyes, piles of mascara and heavy grey and green eyeshadow, also Kate loved red lipstick. It all added to her status as a style icon.

Kate wearing Fong Leng, ph. Claude Vanheye 

Her background in dance led her to mixing floaty chiffons and silks with spandex leggings and dancewear.  The ivory, floaty Cathy-dress she wore in the video for Wuthering Heights was /is a classic piece of loveliness, punk meets the Pre-Raphaelites.  

Kate Bush has always electrified fashion. Part Stanislavski, part sex-kitten, she influenced many fashion designers with her style and but few artists are played more often at runway shows.

Kate Bush, a true original.

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Watch the documentary and get inspired by this phenomenal icon

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Kate Bush, Sarah Lund acant-la-lettre