The Leatherman
4.9.–29.11.2026
With works by Leonore Mau, Reba Maybury, Herbert Tobias, Dean Sameshima and Wolfgang Tillmans
Curated by Kévin Blinderman, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Charles Teyssou
In 1978, Karl Lagerfeld designed a leather costume for Peter Chatel’s theatrical adaptation of The Leatherman. The play itself would almost disappear. The costume did not. Chatel’s project had begun with Der Leatherman spricht mit Hubert Fichte, published in 1977 by the German writer and ethnographer Hubert Fichte and Hans Eppendorfer. Composed of three highly fictionalized interviews conducted over several years, the book occupies an unstable territory between confession, ethnography and self-invention. Born Hans-Peter Reichelt, Eppendorfer had already transformed himself repeatedly: murderer, prisoner, writer, leather dominator and chronicler of St. Pauli’s underworld. Even the notorious account of murdering an elderly woman because she resembled his mother was stylized through the interviews, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish testimony from literary construction. Long before Chatel brought him to the stage, Eppendorfer had already turned his own biography into a performance.
The Leatherman has never really stopped changing costumes. Premiered by Peter Chatel at the Théâtre du Lucernaire in Paris in 1979, the adaptation transformed Fichte and Eppendorfer’s interviews into a three-act monologue, performed principally by Michel Albertini, with Chatel appearing as both director and actor. Conceived less as a conventional play than as a theatrical dispositif, it condensed incompatible temporalities into a single space: archaic ritual and television aesthetics, leather mythology and the Wirtschaftswunder, the lingering shadows of Germany’s recent past and the invention of new homosexual identities. Hamburg gradually ceased to function as a setting and became the play’s central character. Rainer Werner Fassbinder reportedly considered staging the work himself, while the presence of Daniel Schmid’s camp and baroque cinema situates The Leatherman within a broader German-speaking constellation in which theatre, cinema, fashion and performance continually passed into one another.
Essay The Leatherman, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos
