I n October 1980, 19 year-old Leigh Bowery arrived in London from the small Australian town of Sunshine in suburban Melbourne. He brought with him a single suitcase and a portable sewing machine. A few months later, he spent his first Christmas away from home in a rented bedsit feeling depressed and lonely.
On 31 December, he attempted to raise his spirits by writing down his new year resolutions: 1. Get weight down to 12 stone. 2.
Learn as much as possible. 3. Become established in the world of art, fashion or literature.
4. Wear makeup every day. He failed miserably to keep the first resolution despite completing several crash diets.
“As soon as they were over, he would stuff his face with about 10 burgers, which undid his good work.” his close friend Sue Tilley recalls in her fly-on-the-wall, gossip-drenched book, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times of an Icon . He set about the second fitfully and the fourth with often extravagant application, but it was the third that now seems most indicative of his bigger ambition, which was to become famous at all costs.
He pursued it in spectacular fashion throughout the 1980s and into the early 90s – posing, performing, modelling, working as an art director on promo videos for bands including Massive Attack. During that time, he also collaborated with the dancer Michael Clark , formed a transgressive pop group, Minty, and became a nude model for the portrait painter Lucian Freud. Bowery’s greatest achievement, however, was to t.
