Leigh Bowery: Useless Man

‘I think the fact that I am you should be very grateful for’.
             (Leigh Bowery, 1986)

Bowery wearing self-designed 'pussy wig'

Australian-born Leigh Bowery (1961-1994), ‘defies definition’, said choreographer Michael Clarke.[1] A fashion designer, performance artist, musician, model, agent provocateur and living art object, Bowery’s life and art crossed gender and genre definitions, media and social conventions. His body was his primary artistic site, his materials flesh, cloth, paint, found domestic objects and the affected gaze of his audience (his response to witnessing the shock of others was a part of his art). Bowery did not conform to the expected conventions for even the most extreme ‘artist’ or ‘performer’ of his era, so naturally he influenced the work of other artists. Although writing about the feminist performance/body artist Hannah Wilke, Amelia Jones’ observation can be adapted to fit Bowery: [his] work, which insistently articulates what I call the radical narcissism typical of much … body art from this period flamboyantly objectifies the …  body but also simultaneously performs [the] body/self as subject’.[2] I have removed Jones’s gender references, because while Bowery never denied his masculine gender, his appearance confused his audience —which was any and everyone who saw him—so much that he was considered to be male, female and, somehow, neither. He was a determinedly individual and unique ‘I’.
              Bowery arrived in London from Sunshine, Australia in 1980, inspired by the British street music and fashion movement of Punk, and what he saw as an apparent freedom of extreme expression appreciated by the English. He arrived as the New Romantic movement was gathering momentum in the city, when scores of young Londoners were dressing up in frills and sashes in order to go out to small clubs in order to pose and occasionally dance. The display of over-dressed self defined the movement as a Peacock phenomenon and Bowery, determined to be the most extravagantly plumed ‘peacock’ put his skill at dressmaking and clothes design to creating an original look for himself and his flatmate/lover, the artist Trojan (b Gary Barnes, 1966, d. 1986). Together, wearing blue makeup, adorned with pearls and safety pin face jewelry, wearing military caps with Middle Eastern-style pants, the pair became well known fixtures on the nightclub scene of the early 1980s. Bowery soon began making different, extravagant and extreme outfits for each night he went out. Former friends commented that he would suffer a form of performance anxiety in the hours before going out to a club;  ‘I can’t tell the difference between a stage and a street’, he said.[3]

Bowery (bottom) and Trojan in 'Paki's From Outer Space' look, 1983

             Initially Bowery was considered to work ‘in fashion’, and his first exposure to public gaze was via a fashion show in 1982/3 when he presented ‘Pakis from Outer Space’ at the Camden Palace as part of London Fashion Week. In 1983 Bowery’s clothes were presented on a conventional, performance art stage for the first time, when choreographer Michael Clarke used his outfits on dancers for a piece titled ‘Flippin 'eck Oh Thweet Mythtery of Life’. Over the next five years Clarke would use Bowery-designed outfits for different performances and eventually persuaded Bowery to appear as a performer, in 1985. Clarke’s employment of transsexual dancers and Bowery’s gender-confusing outfits on the dance stage confined Bowery’s appeal to the resolutely avant garde dance crowd however, at a time when, via his nightclub Taboo , he was gaining something of a public profile. As a television documentary presented by Hugh Laurie (South of Watford, 1986), and appearances on TV arts chat shows demonstrate, curiosity about what Leigh Bowery is concerned the program makers and audience most. 

l-r: Sue Tilley, Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, from Hail The New Puritans, 1986

             The fact of gaining access to publicly viewed media was of primary importance to Bowery the artist, because it enabled him to be what he was; neither male nor female but simply ‘art’. In her definition of Foucault’s idea of ‘sex’, Judith Butler writes;

The body is not “sexed” in any significant sense prior to its determination within a discourse through which it becomes invested with an “idea” of natural or essential sex. The body gains meaning within discourse only in the context of power relations. Sexuality is an historically specific organization of power, discourse, bodies, and affectivity. As such, sexuality is understood by Foucault to produce “sex” as an artificial concept which effectively extends and disguises the power relations responsible for its genesis.[4]

Bowery’s work is perhaps unique in its simultaneous negation of gender achieved while exploiting the erotic possibilities of taboo sexual ‘perversions’. He manages to evoke an idea of sexual perversion without allowing his audience to know whether Bowery is hetero- or homosexually inclined; the matter of sex rests purely with the audience. His performances over time sought to negate his humanity as well as his sexuality in acts of pure powerplay, during which he exploited the fear of the unknown that he engendered in his audience. Bowery alone knew what he was underneath his all-enveloping foam stretch  ‘monster’ outfits and his lightbulb-headed cartoon gimp look. 

             Numerous artists experimenting in exploratory body art of the 1960s and ‘70s used clearly defined art spaces—galleries and studios—to exhibit work that exploited their gender, sex and perceived corruptions of normative behaviour. Carolee Schneemann, in 1964’s Meat Joy, had several females in underwear rubbed with raw chicken, fish, sausages and paint, tied with ropes and covered in plastic and scrap paper by men wearing only underpants. The fact of their near-nakedness exacerbates the female form as sexually desired object and defenseless being. The women are ‘man-handled’ as an audience watches their debasement.

Schneemann in performance: Internal Scroll, 1975

              In 1975’s Internal Scroll, Schneemann stood naked but for stripes of paint, and pulled a roll of paper from her vagina, reading the poem on the strip as she revealed each bit.  That work, Jones asserts, ‘extended her sexualized negotiation of the normative (masculine) subjectivity authorizing the modernist artist, performing herself in an erotically charged narrative of pleasure that challenges the fetishistic and scopophilic “male gaze”.[5] Much of Bowery’s work similarly challenged ideas of fetishistic gaze, both male and female, arguably without the same erotic charge, but certainly with masochistic pleasure. He once splattered the front row of an audience at a performance when he spurted water from his anus, claiming later that it was ‘an accident’. Arguably his most outrageous and shocking public act however, was that of  ‘giving birth’ to a fully-grown woman, who emerges naked but for ‘blood and gore’ from between his legs. Bowery achieved the seemingly impossible on stage during a performance by his punk performance band, Minty, in 1994. They had performed two songs on stage before Nicola Bowery (they were married after a Minty gig had gone well) emerged from Leigh’s ‘womb’. She had been held upside down in a harness under his extravagantly embroidered dress until the moment that Bowery went into ‘labour’.

Bowery in self-designed harness with Nicola Bowery, 1993

             There is no evidence that Bowery intended to become a transsexual, despite his forcing his body into assuming a female bust (using gaffer tape and a bra), wearing versions of feminine attire and ‘giving birth’. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not seek to escape his birth identity or gender, and did not adopt a female pseudonym as so many transvestites did; ‘Marilyn’ the minor pop singer, for instance, was formerly Peter Robinson; ‘Manita’ a member of Body Map designers and a Michael Clarke troupe dancer, was formerly Les Child, while h/er colleague Lollah Hollah was formerly David Hollah. Leigh Bowery, a 6ft+ Australian of large build, used his masculine presence powerfully during his act—exaggerating his height by wearing platform shoes or stiletto shoes within sneakers, covered over with fabric to disguise the lifts—and rejected effete or weak aspects of cross-gender display. Bowery’s masculinity was emphasised by his physical presence and his adoption of grotesque aspects of appearance added to enforce his physical ‘threat’. Even when wearing his ‘pussy wig’, a home made item made from unrealistic wig hair glued over his gaffer-taped penis, and no trousers (see first image, above). Bowery’s heavy frame, bald head or dehumanizing headwear (with eyes and lips disfigured, enlarged or obscured) declared him to be of non-specific gender and indeterminate sexual preference.

             In male performance body art of the 1970s, aspects of heterosexuality and masculinity were challenged— most notably by Vito Acconci, perhaps—but usually found to be ‘true’, if problematic, for the artist. As Jones states, ‘Acconci’s body art works suggest that the very need for the continual performance of masculinity—the repetitious restaging of its boundaries to keep out that which is not it—testifies not to its durability and coherence but, rather, to its radical instability’.[6] Bowery’s body art is, because of the physicality of his ‘canvas’ as it were, inherently masculine, radical and unstable. The heterosexual, chauvinist aspects of Acconci’s work in which he fantasizes about copulation with females rarely deviated from the hetero norm. In Seedbed (1971) Acconci lay underneath a raised wooden floor and masturbated as his ‘audience’ walked on the floor above him; Acconci ‘spoke’ to his audience via a microphone and speaker system, emitting moans and groans along with fantasies concocted about the person he couldn’t see, walking over him. Acconci was hidden from his audience and supposed object of desire—‘supposed’ because it appears from viewing most of his work that Acconci’s true desire was limited to himself.

Acconci in performance: Seedbed, 1972

             Bowery ‘hid’ from his audiences in as much as his face was always covered, either in full-face masks akin to those worn by Mexican wrestlers and sado-masochistic ‘gimps’, by extreme make-up or within all-encompassing body suits that dehumanized the wearer. However, he was always visually present and on show to his audience, whether they were dancers at a club, passers-by in the street or paying customers at a performance or gig. Bowery’s rejection of standard social codes of gender and identity were purely artistic (he was, said Michael Bracewell, ‘art through anti-art’[7]), and when sexually active he would dress ‘normally’ in order to solicit men (no make up, no drag and a sober wig). As an artist/art work, and dressed in his unique, one-off, self-made costumes and/or extreme make-up, Bowery did not ‘exist’ in terms of generally understood, coherent identity. As Judith Butler writes on Sex/Gender/Desire,

The cultural matrix through which gender identity has become intelligible requires that certain kinds of “identities” cannot “exist”—that is, those in which gender does not follow from sex and those in which the practices of desire do not “follow” from either sex or gender. ‘[8]

             Bowery conformed to normative homosexual ideas of identity in order to be desired, and when engaged in performance existed purely as an art object.  In his work Bowery achieved a kind of Foucaultian emancipation, because as Butler puts it, ‘the overthrow of “sex” results in the release of a primary sexual multiplicity, a notion not so far afield from the psychoanalytic postulation of primary polymorphousness or Marcuse’s notion of an original and creative bisexual Eros subsequently repressed by an instrumentalist culture.’[9] In one of his ‘birth’ performances Bowery not only releass Nicola onto tage, but also ‘feeds’ her by urinating, in full view, into a cup that she drinks from. He thus demonstrates both female and male reproductive organs, an Hermaphroditic capability (which he did not physically have). 

            

In 1988 Bowery placed himself within an establishment art context when, between the hours of 4pm and 6pm, Tuesday 11 to Saturday 15 October, he sat on a 19^th century divan at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery in New Bond Street, London W1 (where Gilbert & George, Joseph Beuys and Jeff Koons exhibited) and gazed at a reflection of himself. Watched from the other side of the mirror (he couldn’t see them), unlike Acconci in Seedbed, Bowery had no interaction with his audience. Neither did he talk or ‘perform’ other than to move, shift poses and adjust his costume. Aware, perhaps, that he was not conforming to 'usual' artistic methods of creation or display, between1988 and 1990 Bowery had photographer Fergus Greer make studies of him wearing different creations in order that each look be documented, that something be 'left' of his work: his one-off outfits were not kept, and often destroyed in the wearing of them. One of the viewers of Bowery’s exhibition of self at the D’Offay was Lucian Freud (1922-2011). Bowery became a model for Freud, and the resultant series of paintings show the model in the nude (his idea, according to the painter), his gender clearly revealed, his gaze unflinching. According to Bella Freud[10] (Lucian's daughter), the men got on well, sharing an irreverent attitude (‘I put art above commerce’, Bowery told Hugh Laurie in 1986, ‘And having a laugh above everything’), and mutual respect.

Nude with leg up (Leigh Bowery), 1992 by Lucian Freud

             One of Freud’s paintings of Bowery has him reclining on a pile of rags. The scaps of material were used by Freud to wipe his palette knife and brushes, and were discarded in a corner, the pile to be burned when it grew too big. Bowery asked if he might keep the rags rather than burn them. Freud agreed and Bowery took them home, in order to sew them into a likeness of Adolf Hitler. If it was Bowery’s intention to annoy or shock Freud (his family had, of course, fled to England in order to avoid Nazi persecution, in 1939), it failed; Freud was delighted with the artwork.[11]

            Searching the internet for Leigh Bowery in 2012 throws up results which vary from videos of imitators of the artist (which he would have hated, ‘I don’t want people to copy me’ he told Laurie), to documentary footage, performance video and remixes of the one song recorded by Minty which Bowery genuinely thought might make him a music superstar to rival Madonna (or Lady Gaga); Useless Man.  It was a comment on self, gender and sexuality in general; the parodying of a well-known, crass commercial advertising jingle a suitably contrary and defying act, full of humour and menace. It is rumoured that a young fashion designer-to-be named Alexander McQueen saw one of Minty's final performances, in 1994, and his later designs reflect some Bowery influences. As Vogue Italy has recently noticed, Bowery has begun (pace Gaga) to be referenced by many fashion designers. The lack of artistic invention shown by the designers who mimic his work serves to highlight the extraordinary vision and invention of Bowery, the living work of art.

Leigh Bowery, 1991 by Lucian Freud

[1] South of Watford, LWT documentary, 1986

[2] Introduction, Body Art/Performing The Subject, Amelia Jones, p.17 (Minneapolis, 1998)

[3] South of Watford, LWT documentary, 1986

[4] Subversive Bodily Acts, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler, p.92 (New York, 1990)

[5] Introduction, Body Art/Performing The Subject, Amelia Jones, p.3 (Minneapolis, 1998)

[6] The Body In Action, Vito Acconci, Ibid, p.111

[7] The Magnificent Leigh Bowery, dir. Charles Atlas, 2002

[8] Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler, p.17 (New York, 1990)

[9] Subversive Bodily Acts, Ibid p.96

 [10] The Magnificent Leigh Bowery, dir. Charles Atlas, 2002
[11] Ibid

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Teddy Boy

The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges. Being isolated—and precisely for that reason—this sector is the locus of illusion and false consciousness; the unity it imposes is merely the official language of generalised separation. 

The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1967).

Fashion significantly contributes to the spectacle of society, but is situated outside of the academic discourse, and firmly in the realm of consumerism. Unlike ‘art’, which is regarded as engaging with the world on an elitist level, fashion is considered to be strictly for the masses. Even couture, despite being elitist, is mediated to the masses via mass production of look-a-like items. Museums hold costumes in specialist departments, but art gallery spaces rarely (if ever) hang clothing on display in the manner that they may construct a display of house bricks (Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, 1972), show an unmade bed complete with detritus including used condoms (Tracy Emin’s My Bed, 1999) or plug in strip lighting (Dan Flavin’s Untitled [to you…] series, 2006). Occasionally museums or art galleries stage exhibitions of couture dresses and other one-off outfits created by Designers (always capitalized), who might consider themselves to be Professional Artists, but they are employed by major international corporations (Gucci, Chanel, Louis Vuitton etc.) to produce consumer goods that will be sold in large numbers.

Any concept of the ‘art of fashion’ is constrained by its sole motivation for being to satisfy mass demand and a certain degree of utility. However, in the middle of the last century a spontaneous and non-commercially-driven fashion developed among a working class group of British teenage men that sparked a revolution in fashion—and art. The ‘Teddy Boys’ of south, east and north London were a disparate group of males who took to wearing clothes based loosely on an Edwardian design, but which were amended using items of clothing and adornment adopted from Hollywood Western and Noir movies. The resultant exhibition of found items were arranged and displayed on the bodies of Teddy Boys in a wholly new and artistic manner.

The modification of dress by individuals for less than merely practical purposes has, since the advent of mass consumerism in the 19^th century, involved intricate and subtle levels of artistry. Deprived of the means of artistic expression by class, position and education, the British working class male has, since the beginning of the Modern period at least, created their own fashion which reflects aspects of ‘beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status and taste’; [1] all the assumptions we make about works of art, according to John Berger.

Styles of dress and the addition of purely decorative elements to an outfit have been affected since the Middle Ages, and usually by men. Recent investigation into the history of fashion has led to a reconsideration of a widely held idea that fashion was a largely feminine concern. As Anne Hollander has pointed out,

For centuries male potency was expressed in erotic and vividly imaginative clothing, and female charm was expressed in much simpler clothing that primarily emphasized modesty. When women wanted to look more interesting, they either cautiously exposed a small area of skin, or imitated men. [2]

Hollander goes on to describe how little men’s fashion needed to change after the end of the 18^th century though, because of improvements in the production and quality of lighter cloths, the mechanization of tailoring and growth of the middle class for whom ready made suits were acceptable because they were difficult to tell apart from the hand-made suits favoured by the wealthy and titled—at least at a glance, they were. ‘Fashion is meant to be read, not seen; fit and proportion matter less, signals matter more.’ [3] The aspiring middle class of Victorian Britain could look like they were more affluent and successful than they might actually be.

Brent Shannon’s original research into the growth of the male consumer of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries cites the spread of the department store, the popular press and advertising, as reasons for a middle class male adoption of fashion as more than a matter of mere functionality.

Much of the machinery vital to the ascent of a modernized capitalist culture of consumption—the large-scale urban department store, sophisticated advertising and marketing strategies, the mass production of affordable ready-made items—were not possible until the technological and commercial advances of the machine age. [4]

The flourishing department stores thrived as hetero-social centres in which the sexes could mix and consume in pairs or separately, but always within sight of one other. Tailors ‘ shops were predominantly masculine spaces in which customers were served by male staff. Department stores, points out Shannon,  ‘were well-known sites of female employment and activity and therefore already attracted a variety of eager and flirtatious male voyeurs, flaneurs, and suitors.’ [5] Such a point is made by Henry James in The Princess Casamassima (1886) in which its central male character Hyacinth Robinson, who is courting a department store model (Millicent Henning), comes to realise, as he watches her model a dress for a male on the shop floor, that she is having an affair with the customer. Being working class, Robinson only visits the department store to meet Millicent, and when he does, he wears his ‘Sunday suit’.

The working class in Victorian Britain did not shop in department stores, but they aspired to. Without the means (or need) to dress other than for comfort, warmth and protection while at work, workers who wanted to raise their sense of self worth and to make a statement of intent about their social ambitions began to watch their bosses at play, and to develop their own sense of sartorial taste from them. James relates the late Victorian ritual of Sunday courting in the novel, during which shop girls, maids and cooks walked in parks or more often, along high streets to window shop with ‘their’ young men who were similarly employed as bell boys, apprentices, factory hands or footmen. After a morning spent in church, the single suit that the working class male possessed would be retained in order that he could impress in public his respectability as he walked with his partner. They would walk alongside carriages carrying the upper classes, observing their clothes and accessories, enjoying and wanting to be part of the spectacle f their society. They’d look through windows of stores showing new styles of dress for both sexes, getting ideas of how to produce their own versions at home (Robinson’s guardian in the novel is a seamstress who makes items of clothing for girls and women in her neighborhood; her work decreases as ready made clothing becomes cheaper, however).

In the years leading up to WWI the British upper classes enjoyed what would prove to be their last days of social superiority and absolute deference from the working classes. Masculine styles of dress had become both more ornate and more streamlined than in the late 1890s. Top hats were replaced as daywear by bowler hats, morning tails had been replaced by frock coats with tapered waists and flared edges, suits were slim-fitted and three-piece, of which the jacket hung to fingertip length. Waistcoats were decorative rather than merely functional, shirts lost their starched fronts and Eton collars. Pocket handkerchiefs flowed from breast openings, trousers were tapered to the ankle and shoes were elegant and always shone. Even the evening dress for men became less formal, with dinner suits as well as, or rather than, tailcoats being considered de rigeur.

            The cut and style of the upper class Edwardian male’s clothes were copied by as many working class males as could afford to pay a tailor, or buy a ready-made version. It was a look that, after two world wars and during a period of austerity and rationing, would re-emerge in Britain, and be modified as fitted the wearer.

            It is commonly held that the British couturier Hardy Amies encouraged Horseguard officers and young bankers to adopt the Edwardian dress style in the early 1950s, in order that, ‘the average young man of position try to give an air of substance without being stodgy’. [6] Savile Row tailors recreated suits and coats, hats and accessories for the wealthy and privileged, and the sharp look stood out against the loose, wide-lapelled, dour, demob suits that dominated the streets of the capital at the time. Or, at least dominated the City streets of the capital. In the poorer boroughs of London, a different look was being worn by young working class males, many of whom had been born just before (or during) WWII.

Most commentators on the Teddy Boy phenomenon credit the development of the style to being an aping of those upper class officers by working class males. As Christopher Breward writes, Harry Hopkins’ The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties (London, 1964), supplied the approved account of the rise of the teddy style for successive generations of academics and researchers. Hopkins ‘traces its origins as a whim of upper class Mayfair playboys, its migration to the deprived boroughs of south and east London, its importance as a mode of social resistance, and its rapid commercialisation at the hands of a growing retail sector adapted to the desires of the teenager, has become an oft-repeated mantra of sociologists and historians of popular culture.’[7] However, quoting a 1949 Mass Observation study, Breward suggests that by then,

The Teddy Boy was rapidly emerging as a particular working-class London type; Anglo-Irish or ‘cockney’ in his associations in contrast to the continental and American preferences of London’s sizeable Italian and Maltese gang members. Though he drew some inspiration from the ‘spivvy’ style … his look was far more negotiated, deliberately differentiated and consequently more subversive than that. [8]

            With their radically different physical appearance, the children of war heroes (or cowards or ‘conshies’) sought to express themselves as individuals, outsiders to society, but as belonging to a new society of their own making; that of the Teddy Boy gang. Teddy Boys—who predated both the import of rock n roll music by at last five years and the emergence of Elvis Presley by seven—adapted and adopted elements of clothing and style from their grandfathers and American cinema, by essentially including a ‘signature’ piece to their outfits. That could be something as small as a ring worn on a finger, a tattoo, a certain colour handkerchief, a delicately brocaded waistcoat or a scarf. The addition of the original and unique item to the standard dress code of fingertip-length ‘drape’ jacket, tapered trousers, brogue or thin crepe soled shoes, bootlace tie and extravagantly quiffed hair enabled the Teddy Boy to be one of the gang—usually defined by the neighbourhood in which members lived—and an artist (without knowing it), utilising the only materials they had. Their look was all-important, a visual statement which spoke far louder and more articulately than they ever could with words.

The group life and intense loyalty of the Teds can be seen as a reaffirmation of traditional slum working-class values …  to lads traditionally lacking in status… there remained only the self, the cultural extension of the self (dress, personal appearance). [9]

            Certainly some Teddy Boys sought to show off their lack of deference to the upper classes by copying the style and form of the Edwardian look, and by having original suits made by a chosen tailor, to who the Ted would give strict instruction on length, width, materials etc. However, financial restrictions meant that the majority of young men who would and could be a Ted—and many were still either at school or in apprenticeships and so earning little—took to having either their father or more likely their grandfather’s Edwardian suits and coats adapted by mothers, sisters, girlfriends or tailors, in order to fit them.

            The important distinction here between fashion as pure consumer product and as art is the individuality of the Teddy Boy’s style—at least until the look was commodified and mass produced to be sold in department stores. Even then, while elements of the style could and were bought from stores ready-made, the accessories applied to them and the meaning with which the wearer imbued them, was a unique expression of what Richard Martin calls, ‘the maverick, bad-boy self-expression that once was the province of the fine arts bohemianism and Existentialist angst.’ [10]

            The news media of the early 1950s took notice of the emergence of the Teddy Boy after there had been several instances of ‘turf war’ battles between rival gangs and the supposed ‘Teddy Boy murder’ of 1953 in Clapham, south London. Teds were reviled in print as being juvenile delinquents and dangerous to society in general. The idea of the Ted as an outlandishly dressed thug and/or rebel was disseminated across the UK in newsreels, documentaries and made-up newspaper stories. The shock of the new was such that even Americans began to take note, and the first rock n roll musical hero of the era, Bill Haley And His Comets, were re-dressed in specially made Teddy Boy outfits when they arrived in Britain in 1957 for their first tour.

            The swift and effective exploitation of the Teddy Boy phenomenon by the fashion industry was the beginning of a turn toward a new generation of consumers hitherto unrecognised by the retail industries; the teenager. The anti-social inference of the look, at least as it was interpreted by the media, was identified by businessmen as being imperative to the success of their products. It was a lesson not to be forgotten by the industry. ‘In our time, fashion strives to provoke as readily as to appeal … In this capacity, fashion seeks to disclaim society and to declaim the individuality of its single or exceptional wearer.’[11]

            The spectacle that Teddy Boys created was an unarticulated artistic statement that, because of its swift immersion into general acceptance by society was rendered as invisible. The outline of the Teddy Boy, from his slicked-back quiff, down to his crepe-soled feet became visual shorthand for a time and an attitude that was temporally fixed. A closer examination of any Teddy Boy from 1951-1955 however, reveals something more subtle and complicated: an artist working in unique materials.

[1] Ways of Seeing, John Berger, p.11 (London, 1972)

[2] The Modernization of Fashion, Anne Hollander, p.29 Design Quarterly, No. 154 (Winter, 1992), pp. 27-33

[3] The Modernization of Fashion, Anne Hollander, p.33 Design Quarterly, No. 154 (Winter, 1992), pp. 27-33

[4] Refashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity, and the Cultivation of the Male Consumer in Britain, 1860-1914, Brent Shannon p.626 Victorian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer, 2004), pp. 597-630

[5] Ibid, p.611

[6] Just So Far, Hardy Amies, (Glasgow, 1954) quoted in Style And Substance, Christopher Breward, p.190, Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003)

[7] Style And Substance, Christopher Breward, p.194, Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective (Oxford, 2003)

[8] ibid, p.201

9] Cultural Responses of the Teds, Tony Jefferson, p.367 The Men’s Fashion Reader, eds. Peter McNeill and Vicki Karaminas (New York, 2009)

[10] A Note: A Charismatic art The Balance of Ingratiation and Outrage in Contemporary Fashion, Richard Martin p.310, The Men’s Fashion Reader, eds. Peter MacNeill and Vicki Karaminas (New York, 2009)

[11] Ibid