‘Pakis from Outer Space’: Oriental postmodernity in Leigh Bowery’s performative costuming

Abstract

With his extraordinary self-styled personas, the late London-based costume designer, nightclub extravaganza and subcultural icon Leigh Bowery constantly unsettled clear divisions between fashion, performance and visual art. His performative costuming reflects in a prolific manner his hybrid aesthetic and his ability to fuse a wide range of visual elements stemming from high fashion, art, mainstream culture and underground practices that en masse render his bizarre presence highly enigmatic. Inspired primarily by the aesthetics and the representations of South Asian culture, and noticeably deviating both from the subcultural style of the early New Romantics and mainstream fashion trends, Bowery’s allegedly first performative look, the ‘Pakis from Outer Space’, integrates an array of clashing symbols and motifs in a distinctively postmodernist fashion. As fetishization of South Asian iconography, Bowery’s enactment provides a platform for deeper analysis in regard to the problems that postmodernist cultural appropriation poses for the politics of representation of the ‘exotic’, non-western other. Drawing on the discourses of postmodernism and orientalism, this article examines the visual codes of the controversial look and unfolds the ways in which by constructing a distorted and eccentric image of an inclusive South Asian identity, Bowery slips in cultural stereotyping and ethnic generalization. Although his postmodernist parodic ethos could potentially be read as an attempt to create a critical – but politically problematic – dialectical space regarding orientalist clichés, it does not only fail to deconstruct monolithic representations but, conversely, reinforces oriental banality.