Taboo and the designers who shaped London’s fashion revolution

A nightclub that closed barely a year after it opened is the subject of an entire exhibition, thanks to the exceptional legacy it left in its wake. This was Taboo, founded by Leigh Bowery, an Australian-born designer and artist, who emerges from the exhibition as someone far more important to London’s art and fashion scene than I had ever expected.

This is an exhibition based around the nightclub, and even in places, it looks not unlike a nightclub, but is really about what was going on around it—especially the fashions of the mid-1980s.

Leigh Bowery was the heart of the movement, not just in the nightclub, but he was also a networker with considerable reach. Many of the other artist biographies mention how Bowery introduced them to other designers, helped them make connections and sales, and got them into shops.

It was not an easy time to be a fashion designer in London, with most of the world looking to Paris or New York, and although I read many articles at the time about how designers would come to London to find the next big thing, London designers were themselves struggling.

It was the classic British story of lots of talent in making things and hardly any talent in selling them.

Throughout this, a person best known for his performance art and shocking appearance turns out of the missing piece supporting the London designers and fashion scene.

The exhibition then is a collection of the designers who clustered around Bowery and went on to forge their own careers. Some you wont have heard of since, others are now household names.

As a display, it reminded me very much of the excesses of couture fashion shows, with costumes designed to shock rather than to be sold—and doing so garners the newspaper headlines that will help flog the fragrances and handbags that are the real product the fashion houses want to sell.

Here, though, these are handmade by the designer, often to be worn by the designer. Many of the items in the exhibition have been found at the back of wardrobes and have rarely been seen since the 1980s. Upstairs, more space is given over to a catwalk of pop stars and their costumes, and a room of photography tells the story of how London’s 1980s clubbing scene was recorded for posterity.

The exhibition is a story of a time that couldn’t happen again.

London was still filled with patches of squatted housing and WWII bomb sites, and commercial support for artists and designers didn’t exist at the time. Much experimentation with cast-offs and recycling old fabrics was a necessity of the era. Today, entire universities teach fashion and design, and there is a commercial infrastructure to support students in their careers.

It’s obviously better, but I bet a lot of the people visiting the exhibition will have “at a distance” fond memories of those experimental early 1980s struggles.

The exhibition, Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London is at the Fashion and Textile Museum a few minutes walk from London Bridge station until 8th March 2025.

Best to book tickets in advance as it’s often sold out on the door.