I’ve always been disappointed by clubbing. Now, I’m not instinctively a club person - I mostly like music with guitars in, I prefer beer to class A’s, and I start to flag at about three on the usual night out. The club world swam into my consciousness in around 1994, via my brother’s obsession with jungle; but no sooner had I become aware of this strange world, than Britpop broke and carried me along with it. Life became a blur of collarless shirts, sideburns and Sovereigns, middle-class parents suddenly bemused by their violin-playing darlings’ newfound interest in pool and darts.When I escaped suburbia and went away to University, I had a bona fide dance phenomenon on my doorstep - Gatecrasher - but crap finances, blind fear of some sort of accidental drug consumption causing my premature death, and the nagging awareness that £15 was a lot of money to spend when I’d probably get tired and go home at 2.30, kept me away. Since then, I’ve had my moments - I’ve spent Christmas morning at Pacha in Buenos Aires, danced like a gibbon on my own for an hour in Newcastle fuelled by nothing but WKD, seen hip-hop pioneer Kool Herc, and been told off for walking into a Carl Cox set at 10.30pm and immediately starting to jump up and down and punch the air. I’ve even had the strange experience of being the only person in a dancefloor of two thousand people to recognise the latest slice of house loveliness queued up by John Carter as a remix of U2’s “Mothers of the Disappeared” - only to blow my advantage, and my cool, by excitedly screaming to my friends, “it’s U2! It’s fucking U2!!” at the top of my voice. I, in short, have clubbed - a respectable amount for someone who has every Bob Dylan record up to 1980.

And yet, I’ve always had a sense that the really exciting parts of clubworld have eluded me. When I was giving it the full Pulp, in 1995 and ‘96, I sometimes found myself daydreaming enviously about the ideas and images streaming out of the club scene. While Britpop prized world-weary cynicism, dance seemed hugely idealistic, even cod-spiritual - always aiming for that transcendent moment on the dancefloor, or at sunrise in Ibiza. While indie had vague undertones of violence, dance was quite literally “loved up.” And while Britpop was obsessed with the ordinary - songs about making the tea, millionaire musicians pointedly being photographed playing pool and getting into fights - dance seemed full of fantasy, of performance, of costume. Looking back now, Keith Flint’s “Firestarter” costume seems like a poor imitation of American punk. But in the drabness of 1996, with football taking over the nation, the simple fact of a man in eyeliner on Top of the Pops seemed viscerally exciting.

And as I became aware of the history of New York’s club scene, first with Studio 54 and later with Michael Alig and the club kids, clubland just seemed more thrilling, challenging, and expressive - particularly as I was just realising the contradictions between lad culture and my homosexuality. The fact that the club kids scene ended with Alig’s conviction for murder only made it more fascinating.

As time went on, my occasional forays into clubworld always came tinged with a sense of disappointment that I hadn’t found this fantastical aspect of the scene. At Pacha, people spend a lot of money to look beautiful, but no-one could be seriously accused of expressing themselves. In recent years, I’ve let theatre fulfil my need for performance and costume as a means of escape and self-expression - and i’ve become more aware of the prevalence of such things on the gay scene, at nights like Duckie. Nevertheless, a defined performance seems dead compared to the images of fast-moving, young, androgynous clublife that still rattled around in my head.

Until I encountered Leigh Bowery.

I’d heard of Bowery, mostly as a character in Boy George’s musical Taboo and as the operator of the London club night of the same name. I also dimly remembered reading in around 1994 about Minty, the band/performance art collective Bowery spent what turned out to be his last months working with. I had a vague sense that he may have worn interesting clothes. I had no idea of just how he encapsulated everything I’d sought from nightlife, until I saw The Legend of Leigh Bowery. A nil-budget documentary by the amusingly-named Charles Atlas, Legend provides a compassionate peek at the fashion designer/club promoter/performance artist/queer icon. More importantly, it contains hundreds of pictures of his clothes.

There are too many incredible Bowery images to present more than a first impression here (plus, none of the best ones come up on a Google Image Search). But the spattering here should give you the general idea. Throughout the late 1980’s and early 90’s, Bowery was the dark heart of the club scene.

It’s important to emphasise that: he wore these clothes in clubs. Despite the label “fashion designer,” he never expressed any interest in designing for anyone else but himself, and though towards the end of his career he made moves towards performance art, it remained heavily club-based. Mostly, though, he just got dressed up to go out.

And go out he did. Sometimes unable to drink or piss for hours because of the mask and fake vagina he often wore; sometimes in excruciating pain, and usually fuelled by nothing more than a few vodkas; he would go out and dance for hours and hours. And by dance, I don’t mean anything remotely composed or prepared. My favourite image of the film is of Bowery, fully gimp-masked, waving his hands out in front of him like an ecstatic zombie, and spinning wildly around. Given his considerable bulk, that must have been scary to see (and I suppose his transcendence of his size is another aspect of what attracts me to him. It takes a unique type of body confidence to use a corset to turn your belly into a pair of breasts).That lack of drugtaking is very important. For what’s so striking about Bowery is his seriousness - purely from the testimony of his friends, it’s clear he thought carefully about his outfits, and endured considerable discomfort to wear them. Contrast that to the New York scene, where extremes of costume and behaviour were always inseparably tied up with extremes of drug use. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with that. But I found myself more attracted to Bowery’s thoughtful, deliberate creativity - he never collapsed into self-parody or self-destructiveness. And his intense, lumbering maleness, which contrasts so effectively with the androgyny of his costumes, is so much more complex and attractive than the New York kids’ adolescent queening.Had it just been for Bowery’s spectacular club career, I’d have found him fascinating and inspiring. But it turned out there was a whole other chapter of Bowery’s extraordinary story that resonated with me even more.

The Hertfordshire Mercury is not a very good newspaper. With nothing to report except traffic alterations and the occasional robbery, it’s a thin read. But I always remember an article I read when I was about 12. It was an interview with an artist about his relationship with one of his regular models. He described how he “bends himself into incredible shapes for me.” It was accompanied by one of the portraits of the model, nude, sprawled across a chair, one foot cocked. The model was male, large, bald. I remember being transfixed by the portrait, and for the first time by the idea of the relationship between artist and model - that weird uneven intimacy, with the artist coolly analysing the model’s nude body and the model glimpsing the full passion of the artist’s inner thoughts. Contrasted with the staid, comic images in the popular imagination of models perched on stools in front of a class, this was intense and intoxicating. I’ve been slightly fascinated by the relationship between model and artist ever since.So when, towards the end of the film, Legend describes Leigh Bowery’s modelling for Lucien Freud, my ears pricked up. I’m a huge fan of Freud, and was interested at the thought of this king of costume baring himself for this most unfoolable of eyes. But I never expected what I saw - although those of you who know Bowery will no doubt have guessed. The sight of the first of the portraits shown in the film jolted me like an electric shock. It was, of course, the very painting I’d seen in the Mercury years ago.

The article had been an interview with Freud about the Bowery sitting. Leigh had me again. He’d been haunting me, like some nude Magwitch, for over 14 years.

Leigh died in 1994, just as I was beginning to become aware of the very scene he’d dominated. But even though I’ve only discovered him properly now, aged 26, I’ll always consider him one of my formative influences in life. He helped to inspire many of the aspects of the 90’s club scene that I was drawn to - and directly inspired my interest in the model-artist relationship, even though I didn’t know it was him. He was my Marc Bolan, my Bowie - my unknown teenage idol, the person who made my tiny smalltown world a little bigger, a little more diverse - even though I didn’t know his name.

Leigh Bowery, 1961-1994

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There were numerous reasons why this was a deeply unpleasant trend - the fact that people were basically paying to be walking adverts; the fact that any aesthetic considerations whatsoever seemed to go out the window; the fact that expensive designer wear became so much more visible, making it harder for those of us who couldn’t afford it. But looking back, what was really troubling was that it spelled the end of the slogan t-shirt.

Slogan t-shirts were one of the few positive things about 80’s fashion. The previous few years had destroyed the idea of fashion as the bland pursuit of beauty, first with punk’s violent rejection of the whole idea of beauty, and then with new romanticism’s embrace of fantasy and costume as its only sources. Political, straightforward and accessible, the slogan t-shirt was perfectly suited to the age. The supreme example was Katharine Hamnett’s “58% don’t want Pershing,” which the designer wore to a reception at Downing Street (Margaret Thatcher replied, “well, there’s no Pershing here, dear.”). Not that it was all politics: Hamnett was also responsible for the most commercially successful slogan T, “Frankie Say Relax,” released in support of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s controversial no. 1 single, and the equally iconic “choose life,” designed for Wham’s somewhat less controversial “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”

But of course, it wasn’t all inventive and nicely typeset. Slogan t-shirts, like everything else in the 1980’s, were quickly commercialised to within an inch of their life - Harry Enfield sold thousands for his yuppie character Loadsamoney, and tourist favourites such as “my boyfriend went to London and all I got was this lousy t-shirt” quickly spread. And it was in the context of a backlash against such nonsense that the early 90’s label-fest began. After the firestorm of big hair, leather trousers and shoulder pads that has become our abiding memory of 80’s style, there was a desperate need for calmer, simpler ideas, a need skillfully met by Calvin Klein, who changed men’s underwear from elaborate silk boxers into slim, white or grey trunks. Klein new that if patterns couldn’t afford the opportunity for design, something else would have to mark his pants out as better, classier, than the others. He opted for an enormous logo on the waistband, helping push down trousers for over ten years, and inventing the logo as design hallmark. Although Klein kept his t-shirts plain, the principle had been established, and other designers quickly began emblazoning logos all over their products. By the mid-90’s, even Hamnett was selling clothes with nothing more printed on the chest than her own, simple logo.

Things finally began to break down in the late 1990’s. In the UK, it began with French Connection UK’s fcuk campaign. What started as an advertising trick became the visual motif of the whole line, with plain, too-short t-shirts fetching £70 purely on the back of whichever twist on the line they’d just come up with. Although it seemed to represent the zenith of the label, it also heralded its downfall - the need for constant new variations of the theme meant the slogan T was being reinvented by stealth.

At the same time, in the US, the corporate logo was being undermined by the growth of ironic retro culture. Alongside a mullet and trucker cap, Stussy or Nike labels just didn’t look right, and increasing concern about the ethical issues of international clothing brands helped reduce the logo’s appeal to the critical 18-25, white student market. The logo didn’t die, but it rapidly became ironic, with fictional and real bowling alleys, holiday resorts and clubs all providing a knowing take on corporate style.

The final push came with the anti-globalisation and anti-Iraq war movements, who brought back the slogan t-shirt in recognition of its ease of use and effectiveness in the media. In fact, it’s now easier to make than ever - the widespread availability of PCs and quality printers, and special paper, means anyone can make one.

Of course, the return of the slogan t-shirt also means the return of the shit, tourist version. Having spent the 90’s making imitation label gear (”Giorgio,” “Calvin Classics,” and so on), foreign manufacturers at the budget end of the market can once again shift units printing “funny” slogans on cheap tees. But after an entire decade out of the market, they’ve lost whatever little skill they had for a good slogan - with some truly dire results. So here, we celebrate some of my favourite crap t-shirt slogans. Please, if you see any corkers yourself, send them - better yet, get a photo if you can.

REAL TITS
FAKE TITS
Who cares?! They all taste the same!
_________
BACK TO BASICS
Reading
Writing
Wrestling!!
_________
You’re just jealous because the little voices are talking to me
_________
No car? No problem
No job? No problem
No credit card? No problem
Guess what….
NO DATE!!!

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