Story

Curating Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London

Leigh at a party in Joan burey's kitchen

Written byNJ Stevenson, fashion curator, writer, historian and lecturer
Published date 16 April 2025

Leigh Bowery in Joan Burey’s kitchen

Photograph Joan Burey

In October 2024, the exhibition Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London opened at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London. Having worked on 'Outlaws' as part of a curatorial team for two and a half years, a month after its closure in March 2025 there’s finally time to reflect on the project.

‘Outlaws’ was a collaborative venture between the art curation partnership Duovision, artistic director David Cabaret and myself, a practicing fashion curator. Duovision are Martin Green and James Lawler and Martin and I have been friends since the early 1990s, meeting on the London club scene when he was DJ at the club Smashing.

In 2022, the ‘Tell Them I’ve Gone to Papua New Guinea’ exhibition was held at the Fitzrovia Chapel in London, curated by Hannah Watson in conjunction with the estate of Leigh Bowery. It was a beautiful little jewel of an exhibition, displaying a carefully chosen few of the late performance artist and club personality Bowery’s costumes. The display was especially poignant as the venue was the former chapel of the Middlesex Hospital where Bowery had died on the AIDS ward.

Martin and I were discussing this exhibition that we had both just visited at a dinner party - all of us present had been used to seeing Leigh Bowery on the scene in the years before he died and Minty, Bowery’s band, had performed at Smashing in 1994. As a fashion curator, I was interested in seeing an exhibition that explored the wider story of that time through clothes and I feel it’s important to include all the people that collaborate creatively. Duovision’s particular concern is to give artists who may have been forgotten or never received recognition, a platform. Martin was interested in putting something together about all the young fashion designers and creatives who had been part of the London club scene in the 1980s.

For us, the essential voice in the curatorial team was that of David Cabaret, a friend of ours from club days who had achieved notoriety with looks that stood up to Bowery’s, particularly his versions of Warhol’s Marilyn, Lichtenstein’s Mae West and Tretchikoff’s Blue Lady. David joined as artistic director and oversaw the visual development and presentation of the exhibition.

David Cabaret at Kinky Gerlinky 1992

photograph Alex Gerry

I have been working with the Fashion and Textile Museum in London since 2008 when I curated an exhibition there on the 1970s fashion designer Bill Gibb. In fact, it was the Head of Exhibitions Dennis Nothdruft who suggested that I do the newly established MA Fashion Curation at LCF when I was looking to move on from my career as fashion stylist and journalist; he has been incredibly supportive of my work since.

The ’Outlaws’ exhibition subject has precedents in the V&A’s 2013 exhibition ‘Club to Catwalk: 80s Fashion’ curated by Sonnet Stanfill and ‘Fashion Underground: The World of Susanne Bartsch’ curated by Valerie Steele at FIT in New York in 2015. However, ‘Outlaws’ tells a different story, of a community of young people who were regulars at the nightclub Taboo.

Leigh Bowery opened Taboo – so called because ‘there’s nothing you can’t do there’ – with promoter Tony Gordon at Maximus nightclub in Leicester Square on 31 January 1985. With Bowery as their ringleader, the graduates and self-taught designers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and creatives who flocked to the night stood apart from the mainstream. The ‘Outlaws’ narrative showed how they were reactionary and subversive, bringing fun and energy to new opportunities including the innovative and original 1980s style magazines, music videos and youth television which used club culture as a touchstone.

‘Outlaws’ Market area

photograph courtesy of Fashion and Textile Museum

We worked with Beth Ojari, the exhibition designer who works with the Fashion and Textile Museum, on the ‘Outlaws’ design. We included a recreation of Kensington Market to show how young designers sold their work and a dance floor section. Sections on the mezzanine floor explored how music and performance were integral to presenting fashion design to a larger audience. There was also an evocation of the windows of Browns boutique in South Molton Street, where the owner Joan Burstein showcased graduate design, and a section on the way young designers reused and repurposed materials.

‘Outlaws’ dance floor area

photograph courtesy of Fashion and Textile Museum

A word on the mannequins. This image shows the central dance floor section of the exhibition. The mannequins used here are original Adel Rootstein mannequins and are all part of a collection owned by David Cabaret. I had always been interested in Adel Roostein mannequins as part of British fashion history. In Exhibiting Fashion: Before and After 1971, Professors Judith Clark and Amy de la Haye pinpoint Cecil Beaton’s ‘Fashion: An Anthology’ exhibition (V&A 1971) as an important moment in contemporary British fashion curating. de la Haye writes about the Rootstein mannequins that Beaton used for the contemporary (in 1971) gallery, and the fact that the Donyale Luna mannequin, sculpted from the famous Black model of the time, was sprayed white. Mannequins are a central issue in fashion curating and debates on how to evoke the body in a display are ever-evolving. I found it fascinating that Rootstein mannequins were part of this conversation and were everything that contemporary exhibition mannequins tend not to be: expressive, non-uniform and representing the human.

Martin had an idea that we should create an installation to evoke a party using the Roxy Music’s Manifesto album cover as inspiration. We wanted to show the individuality of each member of the Taboo ‘family’. We wanted to give the idea of movement and we needed to be able to incorporate the hair and make-up which was an essential part of the club look of the time.

We had over 80 lenders to the exhibition. Many of the pieces were from personal collections and had been kept as mementos so it was important that we retained the idea of the personal, particularly as some of the original owners were no longer alive. David now works in film costume and props. As it is his mannequin collection, and many of the people involved were very close to him, it seemed natural that he would create an installation that represented a 1980s London club dance floor in his way. His eye is meticulous, and he created a series of mannequin “characters” including Leigh Bowery, his friend and flatmate Trojan, Leigh’s wife Nicola (then Bateman), the DJ Rachel Auburn and David himself using their original clothing. As a curatorial strategy there was an element of risk to this, but in David’s hands it worked and brought the story to life.

Scarlett Cannon and Mark Lawrence

photograph Dave Swindells

Scarlett Cannon

photograph Claire Lawrie

The personal was a big part of the narrative of ‘Outlaws’. Martin commissioned another of our old friends, Claire Lawrie (known to us as Tall Claire) to photograph some of the participants to the exhibition wearing the garments that they have kept and lent. This image shows Scarlett Cannon, one of the lenders wearing her Mark Lawrence suit, a designer and club DJ who died of AIDS in 1995. Lawrence was one of many people included in the exhibition who, like Leigh, had died of AIDS; this was a dark shadow of the narrative as well as being a joyful celebration of mid-80s creativity.

As part of the curatorial process, I interviewed many of the participants and used their testament to contextualise the display. One of the reasons for this was to ensure that the people who are no longer here were included in the story.

Katharine Hamnett t shirt

photograph NJ Stevenson

The visitor numbers for the exhibition were 29,325, the second most popular exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum, and the dance floor installation became much photographed and shared on social media. The book that Martin and I co-authored sold 1,100 copies during the exhibition run. The interview material is being expanded, as I am now working on an oral history of London clubland 1980-1994 to be published in Autumn 2026 by New Modern Books.

‘Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London’ also appeared to be part of London’s exhibition zeitgeist – the Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery exhibition opened in February 2025 and an exhibition on the Blitz nightclub will open later this year. On reflection it’s been hugely rewarding, not least to see the numbers of students visiting the museum. And all from a conversation with friends around the table after seeing a beautiful little exhibition.

Jackets by Leigh Bowery, painting by Trojan on Star Trek Wallpaper, Fashion and Textile Museum