David Bowie was a masterful musician and performer, yes, but he was also a masterful image maker. Throughout his career he shape-shifted many times over, keeping the public guessing as he transformed from one otherworldly being to the next, pushing himself both sonically and aesthetically. The public can now explore his vibrant visual world at the V&A East Storehouse’s David Bowie Centre, which houses an archive of 90,000 items relating to the musician’s multifaceted persona.
The inaugural nine displays, comprising 200 items, were curated both by the museum’s staff and by guest curators Nile Rodgers and The Last Dinner Party. They include mementos from the colorful but dapper Bowie of the Young Americans era. Also on view is the iconic curved-leg Ziggy Stardust jumpsuit, captured in a 1973 photo by Masayoshi Sukita, as is a jacket from the Aladdin Sane era that followed. Superfans will be particularly excited to see the notes and other ephemera related to projects that never came to fruition, revealing that Bowie’s creativity extended beyond even the expansive corpus the public is familiar with. Several of his instruments are here, too, including a saxophone, a kalimba, an ARP Odyssey synthesizer and a Dobre stylophone.
Only a selection of the archive’s 90,000 items will be on view at any one time. But the majority are part of the V&A’s new Order an Object program, which gives visitors access to tens of thousands of pieces from the museum’s collection by advance request. So, devotees don’t have to wait for the next curated display to get up-close and personal with their chosen Bowie souvenir.
