Celebrating Bowery: Radical Costume Parties As Queer Heterotopia in Brisbane

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Taylor, Madeline, Hickey, Anna, & Rohers, Remi (2020) Celebrating Bowery:Radical costume parties as queer heterotopia in Bris- bane. Studies in Costume and Performance, 5(1), pp. 85-100.

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Authors:

Madeline Taylor - Queensland University of Technology / University of Melbourne Anna Hickey – The Australian College of the Remi Roehrs – Queensland University of

Abstract

This visual essay explores the creative practice of The Stitchery Collective, which uses costume as a strategy in their participatory works. Inspired by performance artist, queer icon and costume lover Leigh Bowery, The Stitchery Collective has created a The Bowery Party, a series of events encouraging radical dress up. These immersive occasions emphasise the significance of costume as enabling joy, community, and extravagant social performance. The essay discusses the importance of Bowery as a figure in designing the party in terms of the nature of participant responses, as his legacy provides a subversive approach to costuming the self. The analysis focuses on strategies for and the importance of making and holding space, both physical and virtual, for alternate visions of the body - an empowering ethic that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. The costumes created by the attending public are challenging, often both to wear and to social, gender and body norms. This essay offers a brief example of the costumes created by participants in direct response to Bowery as a radical, slippery and chaotic aesthetic target.

Keywords:

Leigh Bowery; queer heterotopia; party; participatory; costume;

Figure 1: Bowery Haus 2018: Costume parade crowning. Photograph by Savannah Van Der Niet.

Background to project and practitioners

Since 2016 The Stitchery Collective, a Brisbane based design collective, has been creating a series of events inspired by Leigh Bowery. Bowery was an Australian performance artist whose international career (1982 – 1994) has continued to influence fashion, art, and culture. The three events held so far encourage radical dress up, inspired by Bowery’s creative practice and legacy. The events incorporate dancing, performances, posing, a costume parade and crownings for the best costumes [Figure 1]. The last two events were held as the flagship closing-night party for Melt: Festival of Queer Arts and Culture, Brisbane’s annual queer arts festival produced by the Brisbane Powerhouse. This programming further honours Bowery’s legacy in the queer community and forefronts the creativity and social importance of queer cultures of costume.

To contextualise this essay and our creative practice, it is essential to introduce Leigh Bowery, who has been the subject of significant scholarship in this issue and elsewhere (Tilley 1997; Greer 2005; Karantonis 2015). Bowery was born in a conservative suburb of Sunshine in Melbourne in 1961. After permanently relocating to London aged 19 in 1980, he began selling his clothing designs at Kensington Markets and fashion boutiques, and designing costumes for others to wear both at club nights and for the Michael Clark dance company. As the decade progressed Bowery quickly became an influential figure in the New Romantic club subculture, with Elizabeth Wilson terming him the era’s “high priest” (2007: 103), hosting the nightclub Taboo, performing at clubs and festivals in London as well as touring Europe, New York, and Japan. He became “the primary wearer and performer of his designs” (Granata 2017: 55), and his work increasingly entered the art scene, performed in galleries and captured through studio portraiture, like that of Greer’s (2005). Photographs by Greer, shot across the 1980s and 1990s, provide valuable documentation of Bowery’s costumes1. Bowery’s costume-making, performance, and image-making practice that emerged over this period was to become a significant body of work that challenged and subverted both mainstream and avant-garde practices of fashion and clothing. Sadly Bowery passed away in 1994 at just 33 years of age due to AIDS-related illness, leaving behind a significant visual legacy that has been described as ‘brutal, visceral, gruesome, at best tasteless, at worst horrific’ (Bancroft 2012: 74). Healy reflects on Bowery’s practice, stating that:

Bowery was not simply dressing up; it was his lifestyle and commentary on the mundane, a joke about appearance. His collections or ‘looks’ were based on himself manipulating his body with clothing and make-up. Working outside the comfort zone, he developed a clothing aesthetic that few would dare follow. Original, provocative, evolutionary; Bowery manipulated clothing to totally change one’s appearance, like a form of cosmetic surgery (2014).

With the distance of several decades, critical conclusions can be drawn about Bowery’s body of work and its influence. For Bancroft (2012), Bowery’s work challenged and revealed the relationship between signifiers of dress and the construction of gender, further arguing that his creative practice was one of the first to reveal gender using the body. For Granata, the use of ‘taboo’ performance practices such as on-stage enemas and birth scenes evidences Bowery’s “interest in exploring the boundaries and limits of the body” to further unsettle audiences using strategies of inversion, debasement and degradation (2017: 61; 2016: 110).

1 A useful selection of Greer’s portraits of Bowery from 1988 to 1994, published by The Guardian in March 2019, can be found online here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2019/mar/06/leigh- bowery-most-outrageous-looks-in-pictures She goes on to argue that his experimentation with, and transformation of, his body, both during his more theatrical performances and with his highly artificial ‘daywear self’, emphasises the fluidity and performativity of gender constructions (2017: 70). This recalls Butler’s notion of ‘gender trouble’, whereby acts of ‘subversive confusion’ ([1990] 1999, 46) through dress and performance of identities work to socially undermine rigid understanding of identity as fixed, stable and categorical. Bowery’s prolific body of work presented many alternate visions of the body, which work to first, individually challenge specific aesthetic codes informed by notions of heternormative gender, good taste and the normative body, and second, en masse by destabilising the notion of singular, fixed identity. Looking specifically at his aesthetic strategies, several defining characteristics are common across Bowery’s work. These include masks or elements covering the face, distortion and manipulation of the body, incorporating every day and non-traditional objects, costumes that fully engulf and obscure the person, repetition of print from head to toe, playing with scale and an exaggeration of features (including clown-like makeup), all visible in Figure 1. More broadly his work engaged deeply with aspects of embodiment, using his costumes to incite discomfort for the wearer and viewer, embracing the terrifying, and repositioning the ugly as beautiful.

These distinctive elements position Bowery’s aesthetic as one that can be reinterpreted and reimagined by audiences as they offer clear guidelines, but also endless possibilities. In high fashion, Bowery’s aesthetic influenced Vivienne Westwood and Jean-Paul Gaultier and was documented in influential magazines like i-D, The Face and Blitz during his lifetime (Granata 2017: 166; Healy 2014), and posthumously has been reinterpreted by designers including Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, and Rick Owens. In performance art practice, Bowery’s aesthetic can be seen in contemporary work such as that by Sydney performance duo The Huxleys. On a vernacular level, Bowery’s recognisable aesthetic offers distinct elements for dress-uppers to incorporate into their outfits, such as simple restagings of his iconic looks such as the stacked reading glasses, the melting candle on a bald head [Figure 13], or the exaggerated lips [Figures 1, 2, 5, 10, 12, 15 and 16].

The Stitchery Collective, founded in 2010, is a group of fashion, art and performance practitioners based in Brisbane, Australia. Our work draws on our diverse individual interests including installation, costume design and making, fashion, art exhibitions and curation, research, innovative fashion design, education and performance making. Collectively we are inspired by the potential of creative design practice to connect individuals and develop vibrant and inclusive communities. The critical potential of Bowery’s practice speaks clearly to this ethos, with his work being simultaneously challenging and joyous. In choosing Bowery as a central figure around which these events were designed, we wanted to introduce potential audience members to his subversive approaches to fashioning the body, to inspire people to question and play with what they wear. This motivation, and the use of Bowery as its champion, connects to our collective’s broader ideas about challenging the rigid structures of contemporary commercial fashion. In the act of rejecting normative presentations of the body, playing with ‘good taste’ and ‘respectability’, and blurring legible codes of gender, our motivation to have the audience adopt Bowery’s practices inherently asks them to question why codes of fashionable dress are so rigid and why challenging them might offer alternatives to the homogenising effects of the contemporary fashion system.

Event chronology

The first iteration of The Bowery Party, an event entitled The Bowery Bowl, was held on October 31st, 2016, at the East Brisbane Bowls Club in collaboration with BackBone Youth Arts2. In the lead up to the event, the party was marketed as a celebration of Leigh Bowery and included promotional ‘How to get to Bowery Bowl’ videos, ‘outfit inspiration’ images that showed the diversity of Bowery’s practice, and tips for dressing in the style of Bowery using accessible household items. This content was disseminated across social media channels, traditional media and locally distributed flyers and posters. The resulting event was proof that this experimental concept worked. Around 100 attendees - participants in this context - engaged with the set design, consisting of indoor dancing areas marked out by suspended foil curtains, outdoor play installations, and a heavily decorated gender-neutral bathroom design, and it became clear that participants’ costumed state facilitated fluid social interactions. The costume competition invited participants to display their costumes and parade on the dance floor, with the onlooking audience making space for their path and cheering them on [Figure 2]. The crowning awarded a ‘Best Bowery Look’, a ‘Best Club Kid Look’ and a ‘Queen of the Bowl’, categories which were organically agreed on by a panel of judges on the night. Following the costume parade, the energy, cohesiveness, and community feel of the event noticeably changed, and emotions were heightened. Similarly, in the days after the event, the publication of images of the event facilitated a rich online conversation that included further sharing of personal documentation of the evening.

2 A video of the 2016 event is viewable here: https://youtu.be/ueoZwM_sUso

Figure 2: Bowery Bowl 2016: Participant performing in costume parade. Photograph by Savannah Van Der Niet.

In 2018, The Stitchery Collective was invited to hold The Bowery Party as part of Melt: Festival of Queer Arts and Culture produced by Brisbane Powerhouse. Renamed Bowery Haus, the production value and scale of the event expanded, while the format and focus of the event remained consistent3. Similar to the previous event, videos and social media were used to set the tone of the event, explaining who Bowery was, how we hoped participants might engage, and establishing the inclusive nature of the evening. An immersive site design in response to the cavernous Turbine Hall venue was created, filling this space with over 500 metres of glitter curtains. Approximately 300 costumed attendees gathered to celebrate Bowery and dance to music from DJ Death Stares, Sullivan, and internationally acclaimed electro-pop musician Paul Mac, who is best known for his work from the early 2000s. The costume parade of self-selected participants who walked along a human red carpet (a head-to- toe gingham clad performer, rolled up in a red carpet, who unfurled the carpet by literally rolling themselves towards the stage in the style of a stunt performed at the previous year’s ‘RuPaul’s Drag Con’ event) and up onto the stage encouraged a highly performative style [Figures 3 and 4]. A form of costuming was provided on the night, with a glitter station to encourage participation for late joiners and passersby. The photography and videos of the

3 A video of the 2018 event is viewable here: https://youtu.be/sz1_Rv4-xbA night were released in the following weeks and this archive generated community discussion and reflection on the event.

Figures 3, 4: Bowery Haus 2018: Participants performing in costume parade. Photographs by Savannah Van Der Niet.

The third iteration, held in 2019, was the second Bowery Haus held at the Brisbane Powerhouse to close Melt Festival4. Following the success of the previous year’s event, the 2019 iteration benefitted from substantial social and traditional marketing, in addition to two year’s worth of word-of-mouth reviews, resulting in our largest attendance of approximately 400 participants. Importantly, part of the 2019 marketing strategy encouraged participants to attend even without a costume, as we received feedback that the strong emphasis on costumes had intimidated some individuals in previous years, dissuading them from attending. We restaged the previous set design and event format, with an added live performance from The Architects of Sound, a Brisbane-based, conceptual, queer comedy band, followed by DJ sets from Sullivan and DJ Sweaty Baby, and the costume parade and crownings. This expansion of our programming was an effort to emphasise the event’s performative nature, in addition to the focus on locality by prioritising Brisbane artists. We also contracted fashion photographer Georgia Wallace to take studio portraits of participants [Figures 10 - 16], in a nod to Greer’s work with Bowery and in recognition of the importance of documentation to both his legacy and honouring the costume creativity of participants. The diversity of costumes recorded indicated the expansive possibility of Bowery as a provocation. Many participants chose to celebrate Bowery through directly restaging his outfits, some took loose

4 A video of the 2019 event is viewable here: https://youtu.be/d8S7-I8xXMk inspiration from his aesthetic and focused on radically expressing themselves through costume, while others created costumes which expanded a narrative from their looks in previous iterations of the event, a tactic Bowery himself employed (Granata 2017: 162-163).

As this chronology makes clear, the scale and aims of the event have developed with each iteration. While the first party was born from a desire to produce a fun and creative event, it has evolved into an ongoing framework for participatory exploration of radical dress up that draws on its locality to build community. This format provides further connection to the context and focus Bowery’s work, as each of the events have involved performances by artists and participants, a party atmosphere of dancing, socialising and exploration of the event space and an extensive investment in costume, both by the participants and by ourselves as facilitators. These aspects emphasise inclusive community engagement, making space for people to connect and celebrate alternate visions of the body and diverse forms of creativity, at once challenging both hetornomative codes of dress and notions of who and what is deemed appropriate, fashionable and even beautiful.

Making and holding space for queer cultures of costume

The events emphasise the significance of costume in enabling joy, building community and radically questioning dominant paradigms around gender and the body, an empowering ethic that celebrates diversity and inclusivity. Essential to this last aspect is the imaginative and physical space held to celebrate costume creativity. There is a long history of queer cultures of costume, for example, the New York Ball scene, Life Ball in Vienna, and drag performances broadly. As a collective, we are mindful not to position our events as a ‘Ball’, which have their own cultural specificity and lineage. However, how moore theorises social performances at these Balls, and similar events, connects strongly with the ethos and outcomes of our events, and Bowery himself. moore states that

Fabulousness doesn’t take a lot of money. It requires high levels of creativity, imagination and originality; it’s dangerous, political, risky, and largely practiced by queer, trans, transfeminine people of color or other marginalized groups; it’s about making a spectacle of oneself in a world that seeks to suppress and undervalue fabulous people (2018: 8).

The concept of ‘holding space’ is useful to theorise The Stitchery Collective’s facilitation of participant’s spectacular creativity. Drawn from the fields of therapy and counselling, it has been defined by Binder for social or participatory art as ‘the act of creating an affirmative environment in which multiple modes of identity, agency, and participation can unfold’ (2018: 7). Several strategies are employed to create this environment, which combine to facilitate performance by, and celebration of, the participants.

The resulting events can be considered examples of ‘queer heterotopias’, sites of empowerment theorised by Angela Jones in which “othered” individuals can freely perform their identities and transgress dominant heteronormative ideals (2009: 1). Regan Lynch, who is exploring queer heterotopias, argues such club nights are powerful political spaces that enable us to understand dominant paradigms as somewhat arbitrary, and thus changeable, potentially precursors to different visions of the future (2019). The ethic of these events emphasises inclusivity, individual difference and historical and ongoing queer cultures of costume. Further, the emphasis on participant’s costumes as creative works vital to the event’s success, connects with the ethical issues highlighted by Hann in her critique of the political and ideological positioning of professional costume’s craft over popular costume cultures in costume research and practice (2019: 24). The strategies employed to make and hold space for the participants to play with their identities and challenge dominant visions of the body, and the creativity and work involved in the resulting costume outcomes are explored in the next sections.

Conceptually this space is defined through early communications with participants, using the imagery of Bowery to express the creative direction and character of the event. These communications invite participants to start planning their costumes, a form of creativity that encourages a sense of belonging and ownership over the event, while also building anticipation5. Further to this, the language surrounding the events promotes inclusivity, diversity and suggests varying levels of engagement. In particular, ‘permission’ is given for participants to attend whether costumed or not, an ethical consideration that is important for the event to be truly queer and inclusive. Seeking out and attending such an event provides a point of connection between attendees, further engendering a sense of belonging and community.

Physically, the design of the event space both visually stimulates and encloses the party. Layered foil curtains envelop the dancefloor, performance stage and, for later events, the surrounding mezzanine levels. The shimmering curtains are hung floor to ceiling and are suspended across the dancefloor, creating an immersive environment that participants can

5 Examples of this pre-event promotional material is visible at the start of the 2016 and 2018 videos touch [Figure 2]. As well as physically signifying the spatial boundaries of the event, the scale of this site design testifies to the investment of time and energy that goes into creating this work for the participants to enjoy. The multiple levels also enable different types and spaces for participation, whether deep on the dancefloor or people-watching from above6.

One of the most significant ways in which space is made for participants is via the costume parade. The timing and framing of the parade positions attendees at the centre of the event, acknowledging their creativity and contribution. The parade is a communal highlight of the evening, timed to be when most attendees are present, and allow for the resulting strengthened emotional connections between participants to carry throughout the rest of the night.

6 The site design is best understood through viewing the event videos

Figures 5 - 8: Bowery Haus 2019: participants performing in the costume parade. Photographs by Deelan Dolan.

For the parade, the dance floor is literally parted, and the musical acts paused. The procession of paraders are given the full attention of the crowd as they perform their chosen look [Figures 5 – 8]. This focus on the performances of the costumes intermixed with socialising and dancing replicates the trajectory of many of Bowery’s own performance events. In thinking about this costume parade, it is helpful to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s reflection that the ‘carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators’ (Bakhtin 1984: 7). He goes on to argue that elaborate costumes and masks allow people to set aside their everyday individuality and experience a heightened sense of social unity. As paraders emerge from the crowd, perform for a time while an MC provides commentary and guidance, and then melt back into the audience, the ‘performers’ and the ‘public’ at this event can be understood as one and the same, further enabling a sense of belonging amongst all attendees, and drawing attention to the creativity and diversity of their costumes.

An essential aspect for the event is the foregrounding of documentation of the participants and their costumes. For Jones, queer heterotopias are spaces created by individuals where they can explore and publicly present new subjectivities (2009: 4), and photographers, videographers and selfie walls make up a significant part of the entertainment and experience of the party. The explicit nature of this video and photo capturing heightens the participant’s performativity [see Figures 5, 8 and the event videos], and again reemphasises the performativity, and thus malleability of identity. This documentation further extends the event boundaries, by capturing the performances, interactions and experiments and later sharing it via social media. This extension of social and performance space through the combination of public costume, interaction and documentation is a nexus that is rich for further exploration in both theory and practice (see Pantouvaki 2016: 46).

This public sharing taps also into the potential of the selfie, photos and social media as a place of political and social resistance: for those who have been the objects of the gaze of the privileged, to assume agency and fashion a gaze of their own choosing. For Roanna Gonsalves ‘selfie culture offers the means to write back: to empire, to heteronormative patriarchy, to whiteness, to all forms of privilege. The real power of the selfie is potent for those who have so far been unseen, or seen only through the representation of others’ (2016). This point concurs with Jones, who reflects on the possibilities of cyberspace to disrupt and subvert heteronormative understandings of gender and bodies (2009: 3), while Sylvester argues that creating and sharing images on social media platforms allow exploration of issues of identity and the subversion of traditional representations (2019: 76). The imagery captured and shared by both commissioned artists and participants celebrates the exploration and challenging of social, gender and body norms seen in the displays of costumes and self, and the creativity agency of participants. The visual documentation also connects these costumed participants deeply to Bowery’s own image-making practice and legacy, which is the subject of the following section. Adopting and adapting strategies of Bowery

In designing these events, the choice of Bowery as an aesthetic goal was an essential strategy in realising the concept of a queer costume party. How participants reimagined his strategies of queering dress lead to a group identity that is diverse, subversive and imaginative. Participants from Bowery Haus 2019 provide examples of the attendees’ capacity to interpret Bowery’s aesthetic strategies, demonstrating what Jones might deem ‘experimentation with crafting a queer identity’ (2009: 2). Bowery’s practice can be described as ‘queering dress’ as it breaks down established binaries regarding the socially dressed body, especially regarding those of body/garment, man/woman, tasteful/taboo, and familiar/strange. As Bancroft suggests ‘by making outfits simultaneously so familiar and so grotesquely strange, Bowery was arguing that all dress is significatory simulation and that the assumptions regarding sexuated subjectivity that are predicated on dress are, by extension, entirely mistaken’ (2012: 71). Similarly, in her studies of Bowery (2016; 2017), Granata employs Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque body, which he suggests is a body in the act of becoming, never finished, never complete, it is continually built and created (1984: 317 - 318). This recalls Butler’s notion that ‘gender is always a doing’ ([1999] 1990, 34), whether it is a subconscious and performative repetition of learned gender, or a conscious performance of gender. In this way, Bowery’s work represents a conscious and changing performance of identity, which challenges established aesthetic boundaries, not the least of which is the concept of the aesthetic legibility of identity through the fashion body itself. The many controversial aspects of Bowery’s looks work cohesively to queer the clothed, gendered body, in doing so challenging heteronormative identity constructions. Granata also employs Stallybrass and Whites reflection that the grotesque critiques dominant ideology, ‘what is high and low’, in her study of Bowery (2017: 54). This point circles us back to Hann, and her advocation for the serious study of costume cultures that are dismissed as ‘trivial’ (2019: 28). This is an important aspect in enabling an ethic of inclusivity and diversity, and for which the costumes are integral.

Figure 9: Bowery Haus 2019: Participant performing in costume parade. Photograph by Deelan Dolan.

Many participants adopted one or several of Bowery’s aesthetic strategies, discussed at the beginning of the article, in their costume design. The participant in Figure 9 employs multiple strategies simultaneously: the floral gimp mask denies recognition of their identity, which is usually sought when viewing the socially dressed body; the head-to-toe floral print disrupts our understanding of the body as discrete parts of differing importance by offering no visual breaks, creating an alien image that juxtaposes the print’s conservative feminine connotation; recognisable feminine signifiers such as red lips, a silhouette of bust, waist and hips and pregnant belly are contrasted with the ambiguous ‘gimp’ appearance. During the costume parade performance, the belly revealed a matching bean-like fetus attached by an umbilical cord, revealing parallels to Bowery’s use of the grotesque and uncomfortable elements in his costumes, and in particular his infamous birth performance, in which he “gave birth” to friend and later wife Nicola Bateman, complete with fake blood and an umbilical cord of sausages. For Granata, it is Bowery’s performance of pregnancy and birth that renders most visible the problematic Western understanding of the maternal, female body (2017: 63). Overall, this costume design and performance presents an entirely queer response to the notion of ‘dressing up’ in costume, which relies on some level of recognisability. Hann suggests that costume is a method of critiquing and resisting systems of dress, rendering bodies ‘between or betwixt’ the normative expectations of appearance (2019: 32). This can be seen in this costume, in which there is little that is familiar, but what is recognisable makes the entirety unnerving. In this context of honouring Bowery’s legacy, this costume discernibly reiterates Bowery’s queer practice of subverting norms and challenging binaries.

Figure 10, 11: Bowery Haus 2019: Participants pose in costume. Photographs by Georgia Wallace.

Similarly, many other participants use recognisable queering strategies in their construction of costume, which contributes to the queer heterotopia formed within these events. Whilst the number of costumes documented at the event was overwhelming, a selection of participants of the Bowery Haus 2019 are instructive for the discernible themes.

Every participant seen in Figures 9 through 16 utilises a covering or distortion of the face, through the use of masks, makeup and ornaments. Though varied in their applications, this commonality disguises the identity of all the participants, rendering characteristics of identity, such as gender, illegible. Further to this, the exaggeration of facial features using clown-like make-up, such as that seen in Figures 10 and 13, works to play with the scale and obscure the face, visually referencing both the comedic and horrific associations of clowns established in popular culture. As seen in Figures 10, 12 and 15, many costumes also fully engulf and obscure the person underneath and their ‘real’ body, echoing Bowery’s tendency to reconfigure his body, rendering the reading of identity or gender problematic (Granata 2017: 62). Similar to the participant from Figure 9, the costumes in Figures 6, 11 and 16 incorporate head-to-toe print to play with scale, obscure silhouettes and reappropriate patterns from their usual context, thereby challenging the usual ‘rules’ of clothing design as they are rarely used in such amounts, creating an interplay between the familiar and the strange. Additionally, the incorporation of everyday and non-traditional objects, such as balloons, children’s toys, tealight candles and storage apparatus [Figures 7, 8, 13 and 16] breaks down the notion of what can be dress and adornment, ultimately working to produce a queer aesthetic. Lastly, several participants utilised taboo imagery or items in their costumes. This is visible in the houndstooth-clad participant in Figure 14, whose incorporation of multiple hands gives a horror-like quality to the costume, whilst the devil-like character in Figure 16 draws on classic occult signifiers such as horns and the colour red, and incorporates taboo through the use of leather fetish wear.

Figure 12, 13: Bowery Haus 2019: Participants pose in costume. Photographs by Georgia Wallace. Reflecting on the range of strategies employed by our participants that are directly translated from Bowery’s practice, it is apparent that setting Leigh Bowery as aesthetic goal is a crucial choice in the design of these events. This results in a collective effort of queer aesthetics approached with great variety and creativity. What is also apparent is the investment of time, energy and imagination in the creation of these costumes by their wearers.

Figure 14, 15: Bowery Haus 2019: Participants pose in costume. Photographs by Georgia Wallace.

Conclusions

By curating an annual event that both champions Leigh Bowery’s queer approach to costume and holds space for the resulting explorations of his aesthetic, The Bowery Party series represent a format for engaging community, challenging aesthetic ideals, and celebrating queer practices. The resulting queer heterotopias, which celebrate diversity and inclusivity, provide imaginative space for alternative visions of the body to be produced, performed and documented. Bowery’s practice represents a collection of strategies for queering dress that are readily adopted by costume party participants and hence lend themselves to the ‘experimentation with crafting a queer identity’ (Jones 2009: 2). The ethical stance of the events and costume experimentations that follow produce creations that queer the conventions of dress and identity as Bowery’s once did, for as Hann emphasises, “approached as an interventional practice, costume represents a potential strategy for subverting the ongoing repetitions of body politics” (2019: 25). This collective effort towards aesthetic queerness in the context of a space held specifically for the display and performance of these aesthetics has resulted in The Bowery Party iterations becoming both an annual, physical queer heterotopia and an ongoing community that champions queer expressions and experimentations in Brisbane.

Figure 16: Bowery Haus 2019: The Stitchery Collective pose with the 2018 costume champion. Photograph by Georgia Wallace.

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Contributor details:

Madeline Taylor is a creator, researcher and teacher in the creative arts. A Lecturer in Fashion at Queensland University of Technology and a PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne, her research focuses on contemporary costume practice, technical theatre’s interpersonal dynamics and alternative modes of engaging with fashion.

Dr Anna Hickey is a fashion academic and fashion public programs coordinator. Her research and public engagement work explores the political agendas in action across the diverse practices we call 'contemporary fashion'. Anna is currently the Director of Fashion Marketing at The Australian College of the Arts in Melbourne (Collarts).

Remi Roehrs is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and teacher in the creative industries at Queensland University of Technology, from which they hold a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Art Theory). They are interested in how different artforms contribute to queer community and discourse, currently through the lens of tattooing, fashion and performance art.

The Stitchery Collective members involved in the creation of the Bowery party series also include Kiara Bulley, Dr Sarah Winter and Bianca Bulley.