For centuries, clowns occupied an ambiguous cultural position. They were comic figures, but also disruptive ones: tricksters who mocked authority and social conventions, picaresque mischief-makers who challenged canons of elegant appearance through their own distinctive, subversive style.

The 19th century French mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau transformed the melancholic white-faced Pierrot into a modern icon of theatrical artifice and fashionable alienation.

Around the same time, the British star clown and comic actor Joseph Grimaldi became famous for costumes with outrageously wild proportions, bright geometric colours and grotesquely comic bodily transformation.

Through costume, make-up and theatrical gesture, clowns turned the body into spectacle.

Today, many of those same techniques have become integral to fashion cultures.

We are in the era of the “glam clown”.

The close connection between fashion and clown

The glam clown blends clown aesthetics with techniques of high fashion.

This fashionable clown embraces qualities of exaggeration, spectacle, playful artificiality and out-of-this-world performance.

Public figures such as Lady Gaga, Leigh Bowery, David Bowie, Klaus Nomi and fictional characters like Harley Quinn and the Joker all draw on this overlap between glam aesthetics and clowning.

Historically, fashion and clowning have been imagined as opposites.

Fashion........

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