By Rosa Smith. Cover images V&A East Storehouse courtesy
Explore David Bowie’s Archive: A Hub of Inspiration for Young Visionaries
Who Was David Bowie? The Alien Artist Who Redefined Identity and Sound
At some point in the early 1970s, a young David Bowie stood in front of a mirror, eyeliner in hand, shaping not just a face—but a future. The image he conjured wasn’t merely aesthetic. It was performative, poetic, and deeply political. In Ziggy Stardust, and the many personas that followed, Bowie wasn’t inventing a character. He was constructing a new language—where style was substance, and identity a work in progress. He landed in pop culture like a signal from a different galaxy—radiant, dissonant, impossible to ignore. Bowie wasn’t just a singer: he was a composer, a polistrumentalist, an actor, a visual artist, a designer of realities. A shape-shifter who refused to be contained by genre, gender, or definition. Each metamorphosis—Major Tom, Ziggy, The Thin White Duke—wasn’t a mask, but a message. He was a living manifesto of queer freedom, avant-garde creativity, and emotional risk. For generations of outsiders, Bowie was a beacon: someone who dared to be alien, and made alienation feel like home.
Inside the David Bowie Centre: A New Home for a Visionary Legacy
Today, his vast universe of vision, provocation, and sonic alchemy finds a permanent home. On 13 September 2025, the David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts will open its doors within London’s V&A East Storehouse, offering a rare and profound invitation: to step into the very engine room of Bowie’s imagination. This is not your typical museum. The David Bowie Centre is a working archive, a creative cosmos in motion. With over 90,000 objects, the collection spans handwritten lyrics, video diaries, concept drawings, custom-built instruments, backstage photos, storyboards, and flamboyant costumes—many of which have never been shown to the public before.
Far from being a static retrospective, the Centre is shaped as an interactive journey through Bowie’s interdisciplinary process. Visitors can browse curated micro-exhibits, watch unseen performance footage, and dive into Bowie’s world-building techniques, from his experiments with William Burroughs’ cut-up method to his sketches for unrealised film projects.
Among the guest curators are Nile Rodgers—the legendary producer of Let’s Dance and Black Tie White Noise—and The Last Dinner Party, a Brit Award-winning indie band channeling Bowie’s fearless theatricality into a new generation. Their selections touch on everything from early notebooks to photos of Bowie recording with Stevie Ray Vaughan, offering glimpses into both the myth and the man.
You can request Bowie’s trousers. Literally
One of the Centre’s most radical gestures is the Order an Object service. It’s exactly what it sounds like: visitors can book individual appointments to examine up-close up to five objects of their choice. This might mean handling an original tour costume, studying studio equipment, or poring over Bowie’s personal letters and press clippings.
The experience is tactile, intimate, and fundamentally democratic. It transforms the archive from a temple of memory into a toolkit for future-making. Whether you’re a fashion student, a sound artist, or a fan scribbling lyrics in your bedroom, the invitation is clear: enter, explore, create.
Few artists have used fashion with the same conceptual precision as Bowie. For him, clothing wasn’t decorative—it was a form of authorship, a way to manifest identity, question norms, and stage personal revolutions. His wardrobe was a living sculpture garden of alter-egos: Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, the Earthling.
David Bowie’s Costumes: Style as Self-Invention
The David Bowie Centre features a rich selection of original costumes, many preserved in Tyvek bags and stored on suspended rails—ready to be handled by visitors with the Order an Object program. Highlights include the Union Jack coat designed with Alexander McQueen for the Earthling album cover, a stunning asymmetrical bodysuit by Kansai Yamamoto from the Ziggy Stardust era, the powder-blue suit by Freddie Burretti worn in the Life on Mars? video, wings by Diana Moseley from the Glass Spider tour, and a sculptural wedding suit by Thierry Mugler from 1992.
Bowie’s transformation wasn’t just visual—it was metaphysical. He didn’t dress up. He became. And his costumes remain, decades later, containers of energy, each one charged with intent, memory, and myth.
The Power of the Unfinished: Bowie’s Unseen Projects
One of the most moving discoveries inside the Bowie archive isn’t what was realised—but what wasn’t. The Centre dedicates an entire section to unrealised projects: scripts for sci-fi operas, outlines for films that never got made, half-finished songs, letters never sent.
This commitment to archiving the incomplete is deeply revealing. Bowie saw value in every idea, even those he abandoned. He documented obsessively, believing that the fragments mattered just as much as the masterpieces. For artists, students and thinkers, this is perhaps the most radical takeaway: creation is a process, not a product.
Among the most intriguing examples: his aborted adaptation of Orwell’s 1984, which later morphed into the Diamond Dogs concept; the surreal Leon in India project, conceived as a hybrid of stage performance and CD-ROM; and countless handwritten lists of words, sketches of costumes, and fleeting lyrical experiments. Each fragment pulses with possibility.
What Gen Z Can Learn from David Bowie Today
What, then, does Bowie still offer us today? To a generation raised on hybridity, queer identity, and digital remix culture, Bowie feels less like an icon and more like a prototype. His refusal to be defined by genre, medium, or gender prefigures the very values that shape Gen Z’s creative expression. He was a multi-hyphenate before the term existed, shifting between disciplines with grace and curiosity.
As curator Madeleine Haddon puts it, “Bowie embodied a truly multidisciplinary practice… His fearless engagement with self-expression and performance resonates strongly with the values of authenticity, experimentation and freedom that define creative culture today.”
And perhaps his most enduring lesson? You don’t need to know where you’re going to begin. You just need to begin. As Bowie himself once said, “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.”
The David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts opens 13 September 2025 at V&A East Storehouse, London. Free ticket registration here.
