Face the strange: David Bowie's personal archive goes on display in London

Donated by his wife Iman, a vast archive of 80,000 items spanning David Bowie’s career will be on display at the V&A. It will be a sacred site for fans, writes Suzanne Harrington

Photo of the album cover shoot for Aladdin Sane (1973) by Brian Duffy with makeup by Pierre La Roche.

Great news, Bowie fans. (And let’s face it, who isn’t?) Just as the Starman carefully curated his own death, releasing his last album, Blackstar, on his 69th birthday, two days before permanently exiting this world on January 11, 2016, from a cancer he’d kept secret, so too has he carefully curated his legacy.

Of course he has. Bowie, a supreme controller of his own narrative, never left anything to chance. His wife Iman recently donated his vast archive — 80,000 items spanning six decades — to the V&A East at London’s former Olympic site, to go on public display in 2025, along with founding the David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts. An inveterate hoarder, it was as though Bowie knew from the very start, from those early days in Beckenham in the late 1960s, that one day his writing, photos, clothes, shoes, scraps of paper, Bowie bits and bobs, would be placed in glass cases somewhere important like the V&A, and that people would queue up to see it.