From the Thierry Mugler suit he got married in to his costumes from the Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane era, David Bowie’s most iconic looks will be available for fans to see up close as the V&A museum opens its David Bowie Centre on 13 September.
Part of the V&A’s wider archival project, the V&A East Storehouse, the Bowie archive comprises more than 90,000 items – which won’t all be on display at once. Instead, in details revealed today, visitors will be able to order up items to look at closely, while V&A archivists and star curators will make selections to go on display in a series of rotating showcases. Tickets will be free.
Nile Rodgers, the Chic bandleader and guitarist who worked with Bowie on the hit album Let’s Dance, has curated one of these areas, with items including correspondence between the two, studio images taken by Peter Gabriel during the making of Bowie’s Rodgers-assisted 1993 album Black Tie White Noise, and a bespoke suit designed by Peter Hall for the Serious Moonlight tour.
“My creative life with David Bowie provided the greatest success of his incredible career, but our friendship was just as rewarding,” Rodgers said, announcing the partnership. “Our bond was built on a love of the music that had both made and saved our lives.”
Also playing guest curators are the members of chart-topping alt-pop band the Last Dinner Party, whose selections include handwritten lyrics for the Young Americans album, studio photos by Mick Rock and – rather nerdishly – the manual for Bowie’s EMS synth, heard on the so-called Berlin trilogy of albums.
“David Bowie continues to inspire generations of artists like us to stand up for ourselves,” the band said in a joint statement. “When we first started developing ideas for TLDP, we took a similar approach to Bowie developing his Station to Station album – we had a notebook and would write words we wanted to associate with the band. It was such a thrill to explore Bowie’s archive, and see first-hand the process that went into his world-building and how he created a sense of community and belonging for those that felt like outcasts or alienated – something that’s really important to us in our work too.”
Rodgers and the band’s choices will be included in an area featuring items that are rotated every six months or so, with fresh guest curators each time.
There will also be eight other sections showcasing around 200 Bowie items curated by the V&A team in collaboration with young people from the neighbouring London boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest, with each area refreshed every few years.
These will include a look at Bowie’s unrealised projects, such as film tie-ins with the Diamond Dogs and Young Americans albums, and even a mooted adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Other areas will spotlight iconic moments such as his 1987 Glass Spider tour, his collaborations with bassist Gail Ann Dorsey and the creation of the Ziggy Stardust persona.
There will also be an interactive installation tracing Bowie’s impact on pop cultural figures from Issey Miyake to Lady Gaga, and a film compiling live performances across his career.
What will really provoke Bowie fans’ fascination, though, is seeing objects up close, “including costumes, musical instruments, models, props and scenery” according to the V&A. Visitors will be able to book to see five items each visit, with two weeks’ notice, using the V&A’s “order an object” service. Bookings will begin in September.
More than 70,000 of the archive items are photographic prints, negatives and transparencies, and these, along with other paper-based items – “notebooks, diaries, lyrics, scripts, correspondence, project files, writings, unrealised projects, cover artwork, designs, concept drawings, fanmail and art” – will also be available to view by special appointment.
The V&A first acquired Bowie’s archive in 2023, with director Tristram Hunt promising the David Bowie Centre would be a “new sourcebook for the Bowies of tomorrow”.
He and his team will hope the centre will be a major tourist draw to its new V&A East Storehouse, which opened in May in the Olympic Park, Stratford. Like the David Bowie Centre within it, the building showcases items from the V&A’s collection, and allows visitors to book to see other items close up.
“We wanted it to feel like an immersive cabinet of curiosities,” the building’s architect Liz Diller told the Guardian. “So you land right in the middle, at the very heart of the building, flipping the usual progression from public to private.”
The Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver Wainwright said the buildings gives “a thrilling window into the sprawling stacks of our national museum of everything”, while art critic Jonathan Jones said in a five star review: “This is what the museum of the future looks like – an old idea that’s now been turned inside out, upside down, disgorging its secrets, good and bad, in an avalanche of beautiful questions, created with curiosity, generous imagination and love.”
Another V&A outpost in the Olympic Park, the more traditional gallery space of V&A East Museum, will open in spring 2026.
