Disrupting Beauty: The Leigh Bowery Homage

Bowery Photograph: Walter Pawlock

SøEdited Team
SøBeauty Director: Astrid Kearney
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe​​​​

​In the grey haze of Thatcher’s Britain, Leigh Bowery wasn’t just a splash of colour—he was the whole damn rainbow, set on fire. An Australian import with the aura of a drag deity, the bite of punk, and the brain of a conceptual artist, Bowery didn’t blur gender lines—he annihilated them, using beauty as both camouflage and confrontation.
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He didn’t “dress up”—he mutated. His looks weren’t illusions; they were declarations. One night: a latex-clad colossus giving birth to his assistant on stage. Another: a glittering disco blob with no visible face. Often, his head disappeared completely—swallowed by a mirrored disc, a stretched stocking, or a dripping painted mask, with thick rivulets of bold paint—red, black, or metallic—trickling down his face, neck, and shoulders like a grotesque yet glamorous spectacle. Fashion became weaponized theatre, and identity became abstraction. Alongside him in this artistic revolution was his longtime collaborator, dancer Michael Clark, whose performances with Bowery fused movement and fashion into a seamless act of defiance and transformation.

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​Bowery didn’t just apply makeup—he weaponized it. Using MAC and Kryolan, he built his face into a surreal landscape of bleach-white foundations, brutal contours, and explosive primary colours. His brows were graphic, his lips either lacquered in candy-sweet shine or smeared with raw, warlike intensity. He didn’t just alter his features; he obliterated them and created something entirely new.

​Wigs, too, were part of his rebellion—cotton-candy towers, ballooned bouffant, and floral eruptions. Hair wasn’t just hair; it was a bizarre crown, always exaggerated, always uncanny. If it didn’t defy gravity or logic, it wasn’t finished.

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​Behind the spectacle, there was razor-sharp wit. “I don’t want to look like a girl,” he said. “I want to look like a woman from Mars.” And he did. He made alien glamour human. Today, his DNA pulses through modern beauty and fashion’s boldest visionaries. In Sasha Velour’s surreal drag. In Hungry’s biomechanical faces. In FKA Twigs, Arca, and Björk. In designers like McQueen, Matty Bovan, Rick Owens, Charles Jeffrey—all haunted, in the best way, by Bowery’s legacy of excess and defiance. He didn’t whisper about beauty.
He screamed. 
​He taught us to confront, confuse, seduce, and repulse.
To be art. To be too much. To make sure the world never looks away.

​Article: Astrid Kearney
Bowery Photograph: Walter Pawlock
Makeup Masterclass at London College of Fashion: @lcf_hmuf - @astridkearneymakeup
Costume /Jewellery Designer: Anne Sophie Cochevelou