10. Leigh Bowery
We were deeply inspired by Leigh Bowery and his exhibition at Tate Modern, which we visited as a group in July 2025. We already knew Bowery as a towering figure in queer club culture, but encountering his work in person shifted our process. It revealed costume not just as decoration, but as a radical medium for transformation.
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Returning to the studio after the visit, we collected whatever we could find chicken wire, bin bags, mermaid leggings, a discarded wedding gown and began cutting, tearing, and assembling. Instead of “designing” in a conventional sense, we let the materials lead us. Trash became glamorous; discarded objects became queer armour. This was the beginning of costume as a central pillar in PLEASE, and as rehearsals developed, the power of these clothes proved endless. Costumes could provoke laughter, disgust, or awe, they could destabilise norms and amplify our political voices without words.
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This experimentation culminated in our catwalk scene, where each of us developed drag-like alter egos. Our personas included Lost Mary, Happy Hour, Wet Dreams, Sugar daddy, a queer bride, Click bait and the list goes on. These grotesque and playful looks were unapologetically “bad taste,” leaning into trash imagery as a deliberate political and aesthetic choice. By exaggerating and parodying social archetypes, we created space for liberated expression, eccentricity, and unruly joy.
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Bowery’s influence reminded us constantly to push further: beyond safety, beyond beauty, into excess. This aligned closely with Jack Halberstam’s claim in The Queer Art of Failure (2011) that failure, mess, and unbecoming can open up “more surprising ways of being in the world.” Our trash drag was failure reframed as spectacle. Similarly, Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism (2019) emphasises that pleasure is not indulgence but resistance. In Bowery’s tradition, our flamboyant, chaotic costumes turned shame and “bad taste” into sources of collective pleasure and power.
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At the heart of this approach was the Yes Manifesto (Michael Clark, 1984), which became a touchstone for us throughout the process:
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Yes to spectacle.
Yes to virtuosity.
Yes to transformations and magic and make-believe.
Yes to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
Yes to the heroic.
Yes to the anti-heroic.
Yes to trash imagery.
Yes to the involvement of the performer or spectator.
Yes to style.
Yes to camp.
Yes to seduction by the wiles of the performer.
Yes to eccentricity.
Yes to moving or being moved.
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Clark’s manifesto, a response to Yvonne Rainer’s minimalist No Manifesto (1965) and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign (1982), championed everything excessive, theatrical, and messy. For us, it became a mantra of permission. Before each performance, we reminded ourselves of this list, carrying Bowery’s unapologetic spirit of yes into the studio and onto the stage.
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In the end, our costumes embodied both activism and excess. They liberated us as performers, invited spectators into a carnival of spectacle and parody, and reminded us that joy, camp, and unruly glamour can themselves be radical political gestures.
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