10 Sep 2025
From Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke, there were many different iterations of David Bowie, and the musician left behind a huge archive following his death. That collection is now in the hands of the V&A museum and stored at its new warehouse space in east London. But most of it isn’t behind glass or hung up on walls.
I remember buying my first David Bowie Album (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) at a record shop in Camden. I remember the one and only time I saw him live at Wembley Arena during the Reality tour. And now I remember the moment I touched the double-ended key to his apartment in Berlin, where he wrote Low, Heroes and Lodger.
That I had the chance to hold that item – as well as handling the vintage nightshirt he wore for his final music video, Lazarus – is thanks to both the great Starman himself and the V&A.
David Bowie Centre
Decades ago, Bowie began not just collecting items from his life, but also archiving them, assembling his own team to do so. That helped the V&A to formulate their own catalogue when they first acquired the list of more than 90,000 objects in 2023.
David Bowie with Red Steinberger Hohner electric guitar used in Valentine’s Day music video. Photo by Jimmy King, Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive
“He kept things from early on in his career,” says Harriet Reed, a curator at the V&A, “but he didn’t seriously start thinking about an archive until the 90s. So keeping it, organising it, hiring a team to look after it full time. That in itself was really pioneering. To think about your legacy and use it as a resource. He would go back to his archive and look at ideas he’d written down several years before.”
Reed shows me a Kansai Yamamoto top Bowie wore during the Ziggy era. I’m allowed to handle it with gloves, and she shows me a label inside. It’s the unique code that Bowie’s team gave it when they first placed the piece in storage. And I’m allowed to handle this, as well as so many other items, because of the unique premise of the V&A East Storehouse here in Stratford, east London.
Costume designed by Kansai Yamamoto for David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, 1972
Order an object
Yes, when you enter the Bowie Centre, there is a typical museum display; 200 objects showcased behind glass, a large screen playing nearly two hours of Bowie music videos. But this is, as curator Dr Madeleine Haddon calls it, “a working archive” that is evolving, so the displays themselves will rotate regularly rather than being permanent.
But that of course leaves all the other objects not on view: 414 costumes and accessories, nearly 150 musical instruments, 187 awards, and then the photographs, lyrics, drawings, set lists, letters, fan mail and fan art that number in the tens of thousands. To access that? Just use the “Order an Object” system. It does exactly what it says on the tin (machine). Sorry, bad Bowie joke there.
“For a performer who always seems so otherworldly, almost untouchable, to be able to be this close to something he wore regularly and intimately, it’s quite powerful.”
– Harriet Reed
Choose up to five items from the Bowie database, giving the Centre at least two weeks’ notice, and then make your way to the study area to take a closer look. Some items you cannot touch, given their fragility or condition, even with gloves, such as the harptone 12-string acoustic guitar he used in the early 1970s. The “Order an Object” process has been in place since May, when the Storehouse itself opened to the public.
V&A curator Harriet Reed holds the Harptone 12-string acoustic guitar used by David Bowie around 1970. Courtesy of the V&A
Choose your Bowie
Bowie was known as the “chameleon of rock” – with a whole host of characters, from Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane to the Thin White Duke and beyond – so it makes sense to allow us, the punter, to choose what we want, given everyone has their favourite Bowie period or album. There are those who loved his Let’s Dance era and those who didn’t. And many Bowie fanatics choose to forget albums like Tonight, Never Let Me Down and The Buddha of Suburbia.
Aladdin Sane album cover contact sheet,1973. Image credit: V&A
But this is about far more than the albums, given that Bowie was a musician, writer, artist, actor, and everything else. As seen by the discovery in the archive of Post-it notes found in his private New York office, which detailed an 18th century musical he was writing called “The Spectator”.
Reed emphasises how Bowie kept everything. “The collection has hundreds of merchandise. All the t-shirts that were ever produced, bootleg t- shirts. He was aware of everything. There’s even a t-shirt for a campaign to get him out on tour again in 2013. And I don’t know how he knew about that, but he got hold of the t-shirt and the sticker.”
Up close and personal
As I touch the kimono, the nightshirt and a pair of Ziggy high heels, I tell Reed how powerful and humbling it is to touch something that belonged to and was worn by Bowie. That there is so much more to these items than just seeing them as objects.
“Definitely,” she replies. “And for a performer who always seems so otherworldly, almost untouchable, to be able to be this close to something he wore regularly and intimately, it’s quite powerful.”
The David Bowie Centre opens at the V&A East Storehouse on 13 September 2025.
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