Story

Q&A with NJ Stevenson

Exhibition poster with photos of people dressin 1980s attire

Written byKevin Quinn
Published date 25 November 2024

Central Saint Martins PhD Candidate and Co-Founder of Post-Grad Interest Group 'Subcultures' Kevin Quinn, interviews NJ Stevenson who is a Lecturer at London College of Fashion and also the co-curator of the Outlaws exhibition at the Fashion & Textile Museum.

outlaw

/ˈaʊtlɔː/

noun

1. a person who has broken the law, especially one who remains at large or is a fugitive.

Whilst the antagonists and protagonists who loom and roam at large in this technicolourful tale of clubbing, style, extravagance, flamboyance and provocation broke no ‘official’ laws they did consistently and persistently challenge and (con)test numerous boundaries. Whether through attitude, costume and dress or the life-or-death impulse to not ‘look’ or woe-betide ‘be’ like anybody else, the relentless momentum as displayed through an array of material, media and music all congealed to seek to break from the present and point to the future. Anywhere, everywhere, somewhere.

Outlaws is a brilliant time-trawl back and through a seminal epoch in British popular culture (1980 – 1986). A period of subcultural ‘street-style’ devised and designed in bedsits and squats that fostered limitless imaginations informed by limitations told through idiosyncratic clothing and accoutrements with Australian émigré, the enigmatic catalyst Leigh Bowery and the London club he founded Taboo, the rapidly beating hearts of proceedings.

Despite only lasting for a year Taboo was a creative hub and effervescent playground for which established show-offs and poseurs (in the nicest possible sense) such as Bowery, Boy George mixed with the balletic Michael Clark and soon-to-be luminaries such as Katherine Hamnett, Pam Hogg, John Galliano and Judy Blame. The world not ‘as’ the stage but ‘is’ the stage became the raison d’etre for a swathe of cultural icons some of whom graduated from St Martins (now Central Saint Martins) with others graduating to primetime television as pop stars and cultural influencers.

As a reminder of how to resist and react to confines and strictures, the ways in which to transmit identity both covertly and overtly and the fundamental importance of place and space to enact and react to these identities this exhibition is a necessary jolt to the homogenous identikit sweatshop tat foisted across the ‘high’ street. (Be)low and underground is where it’s at.

portrait photo of two people — **NJ Stevenson,** **NJ Stevenson and Martin Green**

Questions for co-curator NJ Stevenson

Who are you?

Thanks for asking! I started working as a fashion stylist and journalist in London in the 1990s, working for Time Out and the Guardian, and then came to London College of Fashion to do the MA Fashion Curation in 2007. Now I work as an independent fashion curator and teach cultural and historical studies at BA level, and on the MA Fashion Curation and Cultural Programming and MA Fashion Cultures and Histories courses at London College of Fashion.

Can you tell us about your involvement with the Outlaws exhibition at the F&T Museum?

The Fashion and Textile Museum was opened by Zandra Rhodes in 2003 in Bermondsey, London, and in 2007 it was taken over by Newham College of Further Education. It’s an amazing pink and orange building designed by the Mexican architect, Ricardo Legorreta, you can’t miss it.

When I felt I needed a career change, I talked to Dennis Nothdruft, Head of Exhibitions and he recommended the Masters course at London College of Fashion which had only just started and was one of a kind in the world. Dennis also accepted a proposal of my final major project which was an exhibition of the 1970s fashion designer Bill Gibb. That was the first major exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum after it reopened under Newham. Since then, I’ve had a close working relationship with the museum, Dennis has always been really supportive.

Outlaws came about after I was talking to my friend Martin Green about the Leigh Bowery: Tell Them I’ve Gone to Papua New Guinea exhibition at the Fitzrovia Chapel in 2002. It was beautiful but tiny and only open for a month and we both felt there was room for something more. I wanted to see more contextualisation around the time, both in terms of design and society. Martin is half of the art curation team, Duovision.

With his partner, James Lawler, they give underappreciated and forgotten artists a platform. He wanted to extend the story to the community of young designers involved in the club scene in the mid-1980s, many of whom have since been forgotten. The Fashion and Textile Museum was the perfect place to do a show about fashion renegades as they don’t have the restrictions that larger public museums have to consider and have a very open attitude to programming.

What did/does Taboo mean to you?

I was too young to go to Taboo, but Martin went once while he was still at university in Nottingham. Martin and I have co-curated the exhibition with David Cabaret. We all three became friends through the London club scene. Martin is a DJ who I met when I started to go to Smashing, the club he ran with Matthew Glamorre, Michael Murphy and Adrian Webb in the early 1990s.

David was a club personality who did incredible looks and I met him when I first started going out in London in the late 1980s when I came to university. We all saw Leigh around regularly on the scene and David was close friends with Nicola, who became Leigh’s wife - they used to sew for people together. In the 1990s, Taboo wasn’t particularly cited as this amazing happening, there were plenty of other nights going on that took its place. But it was interesting how it grew into this apocryphal catalyst for chaos and magic as the legend of Leigh Bowery gained traction after his death.

When we started developing the exhibition, I started gathering oral history interviews from people involved at the time and the memories were of a wild club scene that energised the creative and cultural output.

I did witness Leigh’s famous performance when he gave birth to Nicola a few times, he did it at Joshua Compston’s Fete Worse Than Death in Hoxton Square and also at Smashing. And I saw his band Minty play quite a few times. They continued after his death and became the Offset.

The London club scene continued in the late 80s and 1990s as a place for provocation, experimentation and camp creativity and Taboo definitely played a part in that development which started with nights like Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World in the early 1970s and continued into the 1990s with Kinky Gerlinky and beyond, with nights like Kashpoint. After Taboo, Leigh’s outfits got more and more incredible and his presence was always one to be reckoned with. He once knocked me over at the Skin II Ball wearing his head to toe black vinyl look.

two people smiling for aphoto one wearing a hat with badges on the other with face painted black and white — **Brendan Beirne/ Shutterstock,** **Boy George and Leigh Bowery**

Can a club - or subcultural arena - like Taboo exist today?

Sure, why not? There are nights still happening all over the world, it’s very much in the queer culture DNA that spaces exist for performative displays of identity. Although that wouldn’t have been a sentence you would have heard in the 1980s when definitions in club culture weren’t required and non-binary was not discussed, it just was. I’m no longer inclined to spend hours on a dancefloor in a catsuit and 7 inch platforms but while the world’s turning somebody will be.

Does Leigh Bowery have a modern-day contemporary? Is that even possible?!

I did a talk at the Queer Bloomsbury festival at Charleston with Leigh’s friend Sue Tilley and Daniel Lismore. Daniel is interesting in his looks and his take on life and runs the Leigh Bowery Instagram page, ‘because no one else was doing it’. Leigh was extraordinary because of the depth of his knowledge and the way he pushed things to the extreme was deeply grounded in his thirst for learning. Leigh’s cultural contribution was not just drag and not just performance art but an extremely informed and intelligent presentation which built on both traditions and was always, always astonishing and unexpected.

Another organisation that’s really interesting at the moment is Daniel Vais’s Cultural Device/Drag Syndrome - it’s an organisation of dance/choreography and also drag performance by people with Down’s Syndrome.

What was your process and/or methods in collating and curating the exhibition?

We started reaching out to friends and people that we knew had been connected to the scene. Martin still DJs and got back in touch with people from that time. David is connected to a couple of relevant Facebook groups, one about 80s clubs and one about Kensington Market. Once the word got out people started rummaging in their attics. We knew that some key pieces were in museum and private collections but we didn’t have a huge loans budget, for instance to borrow from Susanne Bartsch in New York, or from the V&A. Most of the exhibition collection was from personal wardrobes and came with the stories of the people who had worn and kept them and that became a curatorial device in itself.

A few pieces came from Contemporary Wardrobe, but they are part of the story because the owner Roger Burton, was one of the people who started the boutique PX. We borrowed some pieces from Stephen Phillip, an important collector in this country who went to Taboo - he was very generous. Also from C20 Vintage who have particular connections with the museum and from CLARKive who have an archive of Michael Clark costumes that were found in a skip.

It began as a spider’s web of connections which is a way that you put a thematic exhibition together when it doesn’t come as a ready-made archive, and then it went into freefall and we didn’t have enough room for everything that was offered. The narrative came together naturally, the young designers sold from market stalls, met up in the clubs and were taken to New York and Tokyo by Susanne Bartsch, championed by Mrs Burstein of Browns and showcased their work on Top of the Pops and MTV. We all brought our strengths to the curatorial process. As well as archival research, I interviewed extensively - there was so much information to include. Martin’s crate digger gene kicked in and he found some amazing things that have never been exhibited before.

We also used David’s collection of Adel Rootstein mannequins which he made up to evoke the characters from 80s nightlife who had lent clothing. His critical eye was really key to the look of the display.

orange tshirt with black text saying stay alive in 1985

This period exudes the life-affirming importance of the tangible, the physical and the outright visible in the communication of idiosyncrasy, style and extravagance all embodied to excess. Discuss.

I guess we wanted to communicate the importance of going out - the story is the energy was generated by these young people running club nights and parties and that energy translated into their creative output by day. It was a seamless existence and couldn’t have been done solo or from a bedroom. It’s a story of people desperately wanting to come to the city to find like-minded souls, feeling like they didn’t belong where they came from. Once they got there and found each other the ideas bounced between them. There was also a post-punk subversion and defiance against a boring grown-up world which still harboured homophobia, racism and sexism.

There’s a strong UAL (St. Martin’s) presence throughout the story as well?

Yes, the creativity, ambition and resourcefulness was encouraged by tutors at St Martins, which at the time was on Charing Cross Road in the heart of where everything was happening in Soho. When people weren’t going to the St Martins bar to hang out, they were in the French House pub or in Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street. Other colleges were also important, Middlesex is where BodyMap, Richard Torry, Bernstock and Speirs and Annie La Paz went who were all part of the scene. All, the art schools fostered talent - Harrow, Kingston, Chelsea, Camberwell.

Tuition was free back then and students all had maintenance grants and could live cheaply and afford to go out an meet each other. There was time and space to experiment because you didn’t have to work all the time and live at home.

spiky 3D yellow all inone outfit on a mannnequin

You have an accompanying book in the pipeline, what can the reader expect within its pages?

The book that goes with the exhibition is published by Scala Arts and Heritage and is a fantastic accompanying pictorial volume. As well as writing by me and Martin, there is testament from some of the important people on the scene, flat photography of some of the lent pieces of clothing by the young designers, club images by Dave Swindells, who was the nightclub correspondent for Time Out Magazine at the time and portraits of some of the clubbers now by Claire Lawrie.

The photography is in the exhibition too and was really important to us because so many people didn’t survive, there is an undercurrent of darkness in all the exuberance because drug abuse and AIDS took so many of these young lives. I’m also working on another book, an oral history pieced together from all the interviews that I’ve done. Our aim is to make sure that people such as John Crancher, Mark Lawrence, Mark Vaultier, Trojan, Jalle Bakke, John Flett, Ross Cannon, Elmaz Hüseyin - all bright, interesting young people who contributed so much - are remembered as being part of the creative scene of which Leigh Bowery was the figurehead.

Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London is on at the Fashion & Textile Museum until 9^th March 2025.

Subcultures Post-Grad Interest Group

The UAL Subcultures, Post-Grad Interest Group is managed by current PhD student at Central Saint Martins, Kevin Quinn. The group is open to all postgrads interested in the residual power and value of British subcultures on life and fashion today.

For more information on the UAL Subcultures Interest Group please contact Kevin k.quinn@fashion.arts.ac.uk