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Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels

Published

9 months ago

February 22, 2025

Leigh Bowery Arrives at Tate Modern, Without Labels

“If you label me, you negate me,” the performance artist and fashion designer Leigh Bowery said in 1993, one year before his death at age 33.

Maybe it is this resistance to easy categorization that has meant Bowery never quite became a household name. His cultural influence, though, is beyond question: His provocative performances led him to work with artists including Lucian Freud and Marina Abramovic. His extreme fashions are still referenced on runways, by designers including Rick Owens and John Galliano. And his status as a queer culture icon is cemented by regular invocations at L.G.B.T.Q. club nights and on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

But during his short, colorful and often shocking life, nobody knew what box to put Bowery in. Three decades after his death, they still don’t.

A new exhibition called “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London will bring his work to a much broader audience. The show, which opens Feb. 27 and runs through Aug. 31, charts Bowery’s journey from suburban Australia to the heart of London’s alternative gay club scene in the ’80s, and his transformation into a figure that Boy George once described as “modern art on legs.”

George later went on to play Bowery in the 2003 Broadway run of the biographical musical “Taboo,” for which George also wrote the lyrics. The musical is named after an infamous club night that Bowery hosted, which opened in 1985 on a dingy corner of London’s Leicester Square.

Every Thursday, the party attracted artists, models, designers and celebrities including George Michael, Sade and Bryan Ferry — but also drag queens and heroin users. Each week, Bowery arrived with a wild new outfit that challenged conventional notions of taste, gender and decorum. He described his role at the club as “a local cabaret act,” explaining: “If people see me behaving in such an outrageous manner, they won’t feel inhibited themselves.”

Fashion was the chief concern at Taboo, which operated by the mantra: “Dress as if your life depends on it, or don’t bother.” The doorman would flash a mirror in the face of aspiring entrants and ask, “Would you let yourself in?” The exclusivity was not just to generate mystique: It also created a space where people on society’s margins felt like they belonged.

“I remember Leigh in this insane Bart Simpson mask on roller skates, just bumping into everyone and screaming,” Boy George said in an email. “He brought such anarchy and energy to every club or party.”

Taboo closed after just one year when a tabloid newspaper ran an article about drug use in the club — but just like Bowery himself, the short run only served to cement the legend.

Epic Looks

Bowery grew up in Sunshine, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where he felt stifled by the conventions of his surroundings and would gaze longingly at magazine photos of Britain’s New Wave and punk scenes. When he turned 18, he moved to London, adopted a British accent and set about infiltrating the city’s gay party circuit.

Though he started out making clothes for others, Bowery soon realized that he preferred to design for himself alone.

“Directing his own performance and being the star was a better fit for what he wanted to do,” his sister, Bronwyn Bowery, said recently by phone. While he didn’t consider himself a drag queen, he was inspired by drag, combining high camp with high fashion. His huge figure — heavy set and a towering 6-foot-3 — only accentuated the impact of his outlandish looks.

One of his design collaborators was the sequin expert Nicola Rainbird, who was Bowery’s close friend and eventual wife. Though he was gay and, according to one biography, a lifelong devotee of anonymous public sex, Bowery married Rainbird a year before his death, in a ceremony he called “a little private art performance.”

For Bowery, makeup and clothing were not just cosmetic decoration, but tools for reinvention — and he reinvented himself often.

He made outfits from whatever he could lay his hands on, including bobby pins, tennis balls, tuna tins and even meringues. Some of his best-remembered looks include colored glue dribbled down his bald head like a splattered egg, and giant polka dots covering not only his clothes, but also his face.

Others on display in the Tate Modern show include a pink leather harness that secures flashing lightbulbs over the ears, and a sculptural white jacket that also obscures the wearer’s face with a puffball of orange tulle.

Fashion designers continue to reference Bowery today. In a 2015 show, Rick Owens sent models down the runway carrying other models in harnesses, which Owens admitted was “totally ripped off” from a Bowery concept. A 2009 Alexander McQueen show painted models with Bowery’s signature oversized lips. Gareth Pugh, Charles Jeffrey and Maison Margiela have all nodded to him in collections.

Bowery’s outré style has also influenced the high-concept looks of pop stars like Lady Gaga and a vast swath of contemporary drag queens — though George said something had been lost in the transition to the mainstream. “When you see drag queens referencing Leigh on ‘Drag Race,’ it’s gorgeous, but too polished,” George said. “Leigh was very rough around the edges and he had the build of a rugby player — and was not dainty or fey.”

That legacy also still plays out in many L.G.B.T.Q. clubs, which present the dance floor as not just a space for hedonism, but also for presenting elaborate looks, experimenting with gender and blurring the lines between performance and partying.

It was nightlife impresario Susanne Bartsch who introduced Bowery to New York, inviting him to contribute clothes to a fashion show displaying the latest London fashions in 1983. (She also took him to Tokyo, where she said that he startled the prime minister of Japan by baring his bottom on the runway.)

“When he came in his look, everything stopped,” Bartsch said. “You just wanted to see it again and again. His charisma, even when you couldn’t see his face, oozed through all the pieces that he made.”

Polaroid portrait of Leigh Bowery in 1986.Credit…Peter Paul Hartnett/Camera Press

Bowery would later return to New York as a performer, hosting Bartsch’s 1991 Love Ball, which raised money for AIDS research, and influencing New York club kids like Michael Alig, Amanda Lepore and James St James.

“Leigh had a very special relationship with New York,” said the choreographer Michael Clark, “he was particularly celebrated there. There was a whole gang of people ready for him there and he was embraced with open arms.”

Clark first met Bowery in 1984, when he was bewitched by one of Bowery’s outfits and followed him into a club bathroom to invite him to collaborate. Before long, Bowery was making provocative costumes, playing piano and dancing for Clark’s contemporary dance company, until he and Clark fell out in 1992.

By this time, Bowery was increasingly turning toward performance. In 1988, he presented himself as a living art installation at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London for five days, posing behind a two-way mirror on a chaise longue in a series of his best-known looks. He also worked with the performance artist Marina Abramovic on a piece using 400 live rats titled “Delusional,” which she has called “the most insane work I have made to this day.”

The Tate will show a video of Bowery’s notorious “Birthing” act, which he performed many times, including at the 1993 Wigstock drag festival in New York. There, he wore a bulging costume from which Rainbird, his wife, burst out like a newborn, covered in red gunk and with links of sausages as an umbilical cord.

Bowery loved to provoke outrage, commenting after one particularly extreme show involving an onstage enema: “If I have to ask, ‘Is this idea too sick?’ I know I am on the right track.”

Bowery’s sister said that his desire to shock was partly a response to his conservative upbringing in Australia. “My parents encouraged us immensely to conform,” she said, “but at the same time, we were told to stand out, so we were pretty confused. When someone wants you to conform because they don’t accept who you are, you have a choice: You conform and you lose yourself, or you react.”

‘Disco Monster Terrorist’

“Flesh is the most fabulous fabric,” Bowery once said, and the body’s expressive potential is a through line in his work. Even for an artist strongly associated with clothing, some of Bowery’s most enduring images show him completely nude.

He began sitting for a series of portraits with the painter Lucian Freud in 1990, often posing for seven hours a day. When a show of Freud’s work prominently featuring these paintings opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, it represented the beginnings of a legitimacy in the fine art world that Bowery had long been seeking.

Though Bowery was diagnosed with H.I.V. in 1988, he only told Rainbird and his friend Sue Tilley, instructing them to explain his absence once he was gone with a characteristic quip: “Tell them I’ve gone to Papua New Guinea.” He died on Dec. 31, 1994, of AIDS-related meningitis and pneumonia.

In a biography of Bowery that Tilley published in 1998, she describes his final moments lying in hospital under an oxygen mask, hooked up to a tangle of tubes. “It really was a fantastic look,” she writes, “and if he had seen someone else with it, we were sure that he would have soon been wearing it to nightclubs.”

Freud paid for Bowery’s body to be sent back to Australia, where he was buried next to his mother. At the funeral, the grave had to be widened to fit his plus-size coffin. As in life, there was no conventional space big enough to accommodate Bowery.

In a song about Bowery released the year after his death, Boy George lauded him as a “disco monster terrorist, hanging in the Tate with Turner and van Gogh.” Three decades later, the Tate Modern show is placing Bowery in the artistic canon.

In an interview, Rainbird reflected on how Bowery would feel about this moment: “He’d be absolutely over the moon,” she said. “He wanted to be famous and he knew he was a genius. He’d be very pleased that people were finally taking note.”

Leigh Bowery!
Feb. 27 and through Aug. 31 at Tate Modern, in London; tate.org.uk.

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Acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard dies at 88

Published

7 hours ago

November 30, 2025

Press Room

Acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard dies at 88

Tom Stoppard’s plays include Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Coast of Utopia. He’s pictured above in London in 2017.

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Tom Stoppard’s plays include Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Coast of Utopia. He’s pictured above in London in 2017.

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For more than a half century, Tom Stoppard was one of the most acclaimed playwrights in the English-speaking theater. He has died at age 88. Stoppard won a Laurence Olivier Award and five Tony Awards for Best Play. His work, including Travesties, The Real Thing and The Invention of Love was known for its language, wit and intellectual curiosity.

Stoppard’s death was reported by his agent.

Stoppard wrote erudite plays that touched on a broad range of topics – from his 1966 absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead about two minor characters from Hamlet — to his 1993 drama Arcadia which included dialogue about Chaos Theory and Garden Landscaping. But when Arcadia opened in New York, Stoppard told me his plays were always about people, not abstract ideas.

Tom Stoppard brings his Jewish identity to the stage – decades after he learned of it

“I’m not some kind of intellectual who’s importing very special ideas into the unfamiliar terrain of the theater. I don’t see it like that at all,” he said. “There’s something about the way the plays are written about which makes people think that they’re somewhat exclusive. And an exclusive playwright is a contradiction in terms.”

In 1999, Stoppard won an Oscar — shared with co-writer Marc Norman — for his verbal gymnastics in their screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, starring Joseph Fiennes as the young playwright and Gwyneth Paltrow as his inspiration for Juliet.

Tom Stoppard in 1981.

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Tom Stoppard in 1981.

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English was not Stoppard’s first language. He was born Tomáš Sträussler in Czechoslovakia in 1937 to a Jewish family. When he was still a baby, his family fled to Singapore to escape the Nazis. When his father died, the family moved to India, where his mother remarried a British officer named Stoppard. In 1946, they settled in England. His family assimilated and Stoppard said he didn’t learn of his Jewish heritage until his 50s.

“It was a combination of my mother not looking backwards and liking to talk about the past, on the one hand,” Stoppard told Jeff Lunden in 2022. “On the other hand, there was my strange lack of curiosity. I’d been turned into a little English boy. I was very happy being a little English boy. I didn’t need to become somebody else. I already was somebody else.”

Stoppard never attended university. At 17, he began work as a journalist. Later he went on to become a theater critic, and finally a playwright.

“It’s a strange art form, isn’t it?” Stoppard mused during a rehearsal break in 2006. “There’s a lot of people in a large room, watching a few people at one end of the room dressing up and talking. And you’ve got to hear everything they say — you get to hear it once, you can’t turn the page back.”

Stoppard was talking about the difficulty of holding the audience’s attention through his epic nine-hour trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, about 19th-century Russian intellectuals. Movie star Ethan Hawke gave up seven months of more lucrative work to perform in The Coast of Utopia. He said the chance to read Stoppard’s lines was worth it.

“We’re used to being talked down to. We’re used to very simple ideas. We’re used to people not challenging us,” Hawke said. “I feel the great thing about watching Tom Stoppard, when you watch it, it makes you feel incredibly intelligent. Because you do get it. The ideas aren’t that complicated.”

In 1995, Stoppard said he loved the theater in all its forms.

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“Things are done well, or they’re done not so well,” he said. “And that’s the only distinction which matters in the theater. I think that I consider myself to be at some place in the spectrum of entertainers. Theater is a popular art form. If I didn’t think that, I’d be trying to write some kind of book of essays perhaps. I don’t know. I love the theater. I’m a theater animal.”

And the theater loved him back. The adjective “Stoppardian” entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978. It means to employ elegant wit while addressing philosophical concerns — in the style of Tom Stoppard.

In a statement from Buckingham Palace issued to reporters via WhatsApp on Saturday, King Charles said he and the Queen were “deeply saddened” by Stoppard’s death.

“A dear friend who wore his genius lightly, he could, and did, turn his pen to any subject, challenging, moving and inspiring his audiences, borne from his own personal history,” said King Charles. “Let us all take comfort in his immortal line: ‘Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.’ “

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Haley Kalil Shares Wildly Entertaining Vacation Video With Her Squad | Celebrity Insider

Published

8 hours ago

November 29, 2025

Press Room

Haley Kalil Shares Wildly Entertaining Vacation Video With Her Squad | Celebrity Insider

Instagram/@haleyybaylee

Haley Kalil has recently been the topic of conversation mainly because of the video she uploaded from a trip with friends. The video clip is a hilarious compilation of fun and laughter with the model and her crew, not to mention some hilarious clothes, and a fall that the viewers will keep talking about. This kind of genuine content is a hallmark of Haley Kalil‘s social media presence.

Haley Kalil is labeling her most recent trip a therapeutic one and on the whole, it is difficult to disagree with her point after watching the short clip. It is a video that instantly brings fun along with her friends Shayna Belen, Matthew Cancel, and Samantha Jaymes. There are such lyrics as “We just wanna see you shake that” and “Every day I’m shuffling” in the background music thus the video turns into a masterclass in having a good time. It is the kind of content that makes one want to be included in the group.

The video opens with the group looking fashionable and active. Nevertheless, the true astonishment occurs when the video gradually unfolds. There was a scene in which Haley experienced a minor mishap that instantly drew the viewers’ attention. One viewer said with amusement, “LMAO, THE WAY YOU FELL.” Such a genuine and spontaneous moment is what makes the video endearing. It is not about perfection; it is about living the moment and laughing at oneself.

Another thing that made the video notable and striking to the viewers was the fashion collaboration of the group. One witty commenter remarked, “Lol it seems like you all decided to match your coats.” Truly, at the end of the video, the whole crew is wearing identical denim jackets which convey a fashionable yet unified vibe that even caused minor interrogations among the commenters. A lot of people were asking, “Where did all the Jean jackets come from lol?” and “Where did you get those similar jackets?” It seems that Haley and her friends have unknowingly started a fashion trend, though she has previously been open about her own fashion fails.

The joyous and chaotic spirit of the trip was beautifully captured in the video. One fellow viewer, in reference to a friend who was in the video, humorously said, “lmaoooooo @samanthajaymes_ I know the last drink face all too well.” This reference to the universally familiar “end of the night” feeling was shared by many. Another user added to the hilarity by tracing the route, saying, “Started in front of an Irish pub; ended up falling down across the street from some nondescript bank.” The storytelling in the comments was almost like an extension of the video itself.

Amidst all the fun, there was a little bit of the opposite side when it came to praising Haley’s ability to maintain her cool. Someone remarked, “girl you ate in this,” and by this, he/she was referring to a contemporary compliment meaning she completely conquered the moment. The video even provoked nostalgia in some, one person saying, “Making me want to go back to drinking,” while another was just echoing, “🤭 how fun. I’m Haley after the last drink.”

But it was not only about slip-ups, the technical aspect was also recognized, one person stating, “I think the use of AI was very high in this video.” This suggests that the quick editing and the visually stimulating ways had a lot to do with the upbeat mood of the video which made it more than just a clip – a production. Her approach to content often includes a humorous take on beauty tropes.

Haley Kalil’s post is a classic example of how the sharing of real and happy moments can lead to a positive wave of interaction. It was not a polished, filtered version of a vacation; instead, it was a dirty, real, funny, and somewhat disorganized journey with friends. The combination of the matching jackets, the comical fall, and the whole party-like atmosphere turned the simple travelogue into a hot topic. This reminds us that the best content often comes from just being yourself and having fun, and the internet loved every second of it in return. She has also been known to ask candid questions and stun followers with dramatic new looks.

Lifestyle

‘Left-Handed Girl’ takes on quiet shame across generations in Taipei

Published

1 day ago

November 29, 2025

Press Room

‘Left-Handed Girl’ takes on quiet shame across generations in Taipei

Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann, Nina Ye as I-Jing and Janel Tsai as Shu-Fen in Left-Handed Girl. The movie is streaming on Netflix starting Friday.

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Left-Handed Girl Film Production Co./Netflix

Early on in Shih-Ching Tsou’s Left-Handed Girl, one of its protagonists, an adorable Taiwanese girl named I-Jing (Nina Ye), is told by her grandpa that her left-handedness is a curse. “Don’t use left-hand in my house,” he says to her, yanking a crayon from her left hand into her right and sending a bolt of fear through the impressionable 5-year-old. “Left hand is evil,” he scolds. “It belongs to the devil.” The premise of Netflix’s newest Mandarin-language film might seem trivial, but learning about her “devil’s hand” brings I-Jing a quiet shame that is difficult to shake. Internalizing an age-old superstition, I-Jing silently begins to navigate the bustling city of Taipei with her much weaker right-hand, which takes on a life of its own. What she doesn’t know is that the rest of her family has their own version of a “devil’s hand” too.

In Tsou’s charming solo directorial debut, I-Jing, her teenage sister and their mother have just moved back to Taipei after years away in the countryside. Their mother Shu-Fen (Janel Tsai), opens a noodle stand in the capital’s famous night markets in an attempt to start a new life for her family. But a fresh start is rarely an easy one. Day after day, Shu-Fen toils to keep her food stall and family afloat — trying to pay the stall’s rent while juggling the debt she accumulated from her ex-husband’s funeral, and taking care of her daughters, who couldn’t be more different. The youngest, I-Jing, is steeped in an innocent earnestness, while her older sister, I-Ann (Shih-Yuan Ma), carries the fierce determination of an angsty teen intent on proving she can support the family better than anyone else.

Sean Baker poses in the press room during the 97th Academy Awards.

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Tsou and longtime collaborator Sean Baker co-wrote and produced the project, and Baker edited. Their distinct style is abundant throughout Left-Handed Girl, which strikes a delicate balance between intimacy and playfulness in a story that centers those historically on the margins. The two have worked side-by-side since co-directing Take Out in 2004, with Tsou’s influence woven through films that launched Baker into the spotlight, from Tangerine to The Florida Project to Red Rocket. Shot entirely on iPhones, like 2015’s Tangerine, the film uses the city of Taipei as its canvas and shows its landscape through the lens of each of its characters. It’s a treat being immersed in the brightly-colored, and often overwhelming night market from the point of view of I-Jing, who interacts with each stall like it’s her personal playground before dashing off to the next one.

Nina Ye as I-Jing and Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann in Left-Handed Girl.

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Shih-Yuan Ma as I-Ann, Nina Ye as I-Jing and Janel Tsai as Shu-Fen in Left-Handed Girl.

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Left-Handed Girl Film Production Co./Netflix

While Left-Handed Girl initially appears to center I-Jing and her cursed hand, the film pays equal attention to its female protagonists. Spanning multiple generations, Tsou offers the viewer a window into each character’s struggle between duty and desire, as they navigate a society where the personal largely remains private. Shu-Fen might be the caretaker of her three-unit family, but she remains the black sheep within her own. “A married daughter’s like water poured out,” her mother says to her after refusing to lend her daughter money, perpetuating a traditional belief that daughters are worthless once they are married. And during a family outing, Shu-Fen reluctantly opens up, only to have her sisters loudly bicker over her decisions as if they were their own.

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Meanwhile, I-Ann spends most of her days at the betel nut stall, where she oscillates between flirting with older men for money, making snarky comments at the attractive young woman who just started working there, and sleeping with her sleazy boss. I-Ann’s stonewalled expression and high-pony attitude gives off the impression she doesn’t care about the job, and much less, her boss. But in moments of vulnerability, like after I-Ann attends a party with a former classmate who, unlike her, is attending college, cracks begin to appear in an otherwise tightly-wound facade. I-Ann’s commitment to and reluctance toward fulfilling her responsibilities are felt simultaneously in scenes of transit, as she whizzes through the streets and highways of Taipei on her scooter, en route to pick up her little sister, keep a watchful eye over the noodle stand, or sneak in her own small rebellions. I-Ann might scoff, but at the end of the day, she always shows up.

How much can a family bear before it begins to burst? Left-Handed Girl seeks to ask, as each character’s internal tensions bleed into broader family dynamics, culminating in more of an explosion than a slow unraveling. But perhaps the ultimate test of strength occurs when the dam breaks, Tsou seems to argue — when the water begins to flood, washing away old traditions and instead, creating something surprising and new.