Updated September 14, 2025 at 10:24 AM MST
Anyone looking for Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and The Man Who Sold The World can now find all of David Bowie's personas in the same place — a vast warehouse in East London.
This weekend saw the opening of the David Bowie Centre in London's Stratford. It's home to an archive of 90,000 items that belonged to the iconic British rock star, who died in 2016. For the first time, fans can get up close to huge numbers of Bowie's treasures, from his groundbreaking costumes to his favourite instruments.
One such costume is a delicately embroidered silk cream jacket that Bowie wore on the Ziggy Stardust tour, which was created for him by Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto – as well as the pants and booties Bowie wore to complete the outfit. Nearby is a Harptone 12-string Jumbo acoustic guitar, which has scratches on it and a broken string, and which was used in one of Bowie's videos for his hit Space Oddity.
Bowie wasn't just a musician, but an artist, and the collection is also home to thousands of notes and drawings he made throughout his career, as he moved from one stage persona, complete with back story, to the next. He also kept art sent to him by fans, as well as personal belongings — including the key to an apartment he shared with fellow rockstar Iggy Pop in Berlin in the late 1970s.
"We're always continuing to learn about him as we work through the archive," says curator Harriet Reed, who says being on the project for seven years has been a constant learning process. "I've definitely got a greater understanding of how prolific he was, how insatiable he was in terms of how many projects he wanted to be involved in, how many areas of design or art he wanted to try." She goes on: "We willl never figure Bowie out, he'll always be a slight enigma."
As they sifted through the archive, curators discovered plans Bowie made for a musical he was working on not long before he died. It was tentatively called the Spectator, and was inspired by artists in London in the early 1700s, featuring British painters of the time, from William Hogarth to Joshua Reynolds.
In some ways, the David Bowie Centre is more like a library than a museum — before they arrive, visitors can go online and choose up to five items they want to view, which are then brought to them in a study room. The centre also has a permanent exhibition, with display cases showcasing his influence on fashion and culture. For this opening, one of those cases has been curated by Nile Rodgers, who worked with Bowie on his "Let's Dance" album.
Lead curator Dr Madeleine Haddon is from New York, where she used to work at the Museum of Modern Art. Haddon says she hopes that as well as Bowie aficionados, local people from Stratford will come and find inspiration too. Stratford is in Newham, an East London borough where poverty is relatively high, and which was renovated for the London 2012 Olymics. It should help that tickets are free.
"We are especially engaged with thinking about how we create a museum that feels welcoming and inspiring to young people and is also a resource for the next generations of artists, designers and makers, especially those who are here within East London."
When he was alive, David Bowie had an association with the Victoria & Albert museum, which put on an exhibition of his work in its main site in West London's Kensington in 2013. When Bowie died, he left the V&A his archive, and experts have been working through it ever since.
One of the first people to get to visit the David Bowie Centre was Linda McLean, a British fashion journalist. "As a fan from the 1970s, it's very emotional in a way because it brings back your youth," McLean said. She credits Bowie and his musical contemporaries Roxy Music with helping inspire her to go to art college and forge a career in fashion.
"The thing about this centre is that you can go online choose which things you want to see before you go, and you can actually get up really close to the items — some of them you can actually handle," McLean says. "For any David Bowie fan, that's an extraordinary thing, to be able to be within inches of the garments he actually wore."
McLean says the huge number of artefacts in the David Bowie Centre shows Bowie was an archivist of his own life and work, and an artist who cared about his legacy. "I actually couldn't believe how much stuff he kept... I don't know anyone who does that" McLean said. "He was a bit of a hoarder... there was a very methodical mind in there, as well as being transgressive."
Alan Edwards, who was David Bowie's publicist for almost 35 years, says this is a place the man himself would have appreciated. "This is exactly what David would have wanted… he wasn't a person that was driven by latest chart positions and all that… his influence and the way he touched people was really important to him," Edwards says.
Edwards wrote a memoir which covers his time working with Bowie, and says being colleagues only made him more sure of Bowie's genius. "David deserves to be looked at like this, and he is the only music person, certainly in Britain, that's ever been treated in this way… He will be with us as long as there's a human race. Now, he's in that very rarefied sort of air, the canon of great artists like Salvador Dali, Beethoven, Mozart, you know, Elvis, maybe he will be with us forever."
Producer Biba Kang contributed to this report.
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