Two years ago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London secured the complete archives of David Bowie. What it received was staggering: a veritable goldmine of more than 90,000 artifacts spanning original costumes, musical instruments, stage models, handwritten notes and lyrics, sketches, artworks, and heaps more. So vast and so dazzling is the archive, in fact, that the museum has now built an entire treasure house around it.

This weekend sees the opening of the David Bowie Centre as part of the V&A East Storehouse, the museum’s spanking-new facility at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Here, the archive is being housed and made accessible to the public. At the center’s entrance, mini-displays spotlight key themes in Bowie’s career through some 200 objects; in a study room to the side, visitors with appointments can request up to five items from Bowie’s trove to engage with one-on-one.

David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane mask. Photo: © David Parry / V&A.

At the same time, the center is also an “active work environment,” V&A East curator Madeleine Haddon noted at the press preview, that is unearthing fresh perspectives and research on the cultural icon and visionary.

“Bowie would have wanted other people to use this archive to explore their creativity,” she added. “We want visitors to be inspired by Bowie to pursue their own creativity, discover their stories, and make unexpected connections between Bowie, contemporary discussions, and themselves.”

The relationship between Bowie and the V&A was cemented in 2013 with the exhibition “David Bowie Is.” A blockbuster, it offered a then-unprecedented peek into the musician’s archive—gathering some 500 objects in a spectacular display—becoming the museum’s fastest-selling show (it later traveled to 11 other venues including the Brooklyn Museum and the Groninger Museum). Years on, the V&A would acquire Bowie’s archive with the support of the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and Warner Music Group.

Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) (1980) cover artwork in the David Bowie Archive. Photo: © David Parry / V&A.

Cataloguing Bowie’s colossal trove has taken the better part of two years and the efforts of six research staff—and the process is still ongoing. Thankfully, Bowie himself was his best archivist and record-keeper. He maintained project files for each of his albums, shows, and film roles, saving even unlikely objects from fan art to merchandise. The center preserves his system.

“We realized how involved David was in developing the archive with his team. Since the 1990s, he took an active part in securing material, working with his team to identify items that he thought were worthy of preservation, but also where they come from—which has really helped us to piece together some of that history,” Sabrina Offord, archivist and conservation manager at V&A East, said at the press preview. “There are more things that aren’t on display that we would love for visitors to explore and make those connections that we haven’t yet.”

David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour, 1973. Photo: © Mick Rock 1973. Estate of Mick Rock 2025.

The Performance Archive

Lest the sheer breadth of the archive be overwhelming, the center’s nine mini-displays offer a fantastic cross-section of what’s in its holdings. Six semi-permanent bays unpack themes in Bowie’s career—creative personas, futurism, collaborative work—with objects as varied as the Kansai Yamamoto jumpsuit Bowie donned as Ziggy Stardust; photographs from his 1987 Glass Spider tour; a musical notation of “Fame”; a still from the 1996 film Basquiat, in which he played Andy Warhol; and the crystal ball prop from 1986’s Labyrinth, which starred Bowie as the fabulous goblin king Jareth.

The three other bays are reserved for rotating displays, created in dialogue with the V&A East’s larger areas of exploration as well as by guest curators. The inaugural guest curators are Chic’s Nile Rodgers and U.K. indie band the Last Dinner Party, who have picked out items related to Bowie’s Station to Station tour in the 1970s and Rodgers’ collaboration with Bowie on his 1975 soul outing Young Americans.

Aladdin Sane jacket designed by Freddie Buretti for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour, 1973, on view at the David Bowie Centre. Photo: © David Parry / V&A.

Elsewhere, Bowie’s costumes and stage wear number in the hundreds. A clothing rail at the center’s entrance holds just a selection of pieces in the archive—from Freddie Buretti’s early ’70s designs for the Diamond Dogs tour to Diana Moseley’s creations for 1987’s Glass Spider shows. For the preview, the team produced the shiny red jumpsuit with a heavily feathered neckline, designed by Bowie and Buretti, which the star famously wore to sing “I Got You, Babe” with Marianne Faithfull (in full nun regalia) on a 1973 episode of The Midnight Special.

Also at the preview was the guitar Bowie strummed in the video for 1969’s “Space Oddity,” which has never previously been displayed. It’s just one of a multitude of instruments in Bowie’s collection, among them a kalimba, an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, a Dubreq stylophone (a gift from Marc Bolan and used on “Space Oddity”), and a saxophone, his first-ever musical instrument.

Harptone 12-string acoustic guitar and case used by David Bowie, c. 1970. Photo courtesy of the V&A.

Bowie’s Blueprints

Bowie’s work behind the scenes is wonderfully detailed in his paper archive, which fills over 900 boxes, cataloguer Abigail Williams told me at the preview. There are his numerous sketches, such as his unrealized cover designs for Low (1977) and Lodger (1979), and the stage set design for a Ziggy Stardust show at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1972. There’s also a huge assortment of notes, one of them a notebook he kept during the production of the 2015 musical Lazarus with a page that just reads “PHONE BILL RE: WOODSTOCK.”

Others include his screenplay of 1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (with an alternate ending, no less) and designs he created for his 1979 performance on Saturday Night Live in which he donned a Klaus Nomi-inspired get-up, also in the archive.

David Bowie’s paint palette and knife on view at the David Bowie Centre. Photo: © David Parry / V&A

Bowie, too, kept up a visual art practice, hints of which are on display. His paint palette and a print of a self-portrait he created in 1988 are on view in one of the entrance bays. But yet more remain stashed away in the archive, Williams told me. Among them are his computer artworks (including a 1994 creation he used as a Christmas card) and a 3D sculpture in the form of a pinhole camera.

“I’m just really glad that other people now can see the stuff that only we have had a chance to see,” Williams said.

Lithograph of 1988 painting Self-portrait (Mustique) by David Bowie, 2002. Photo: © The David Bowie ArchiveTM.

Surprises Abound 

Perhaps the most intriguing pieces in Bowie’s archive are his notes, sketches, and storyboards for projects that never came to pass. Many are heavily fleshed out. For instance, he had planned separate adaptations of George Orwell’s 1984 and David Kidd’s All the Emperors Horses, as well as a conceptual album, known as Leon, to be accompanied by a live show, a CD-ROM, and film.

Even in his final months, Bowie was spawning ideas. Chief among them was a musical he dubbed The Spectator. The project appeared to be based on real-life events, as reported by the daily publication of the same name which ran from 1711 to 1712. Bowie had filled a notebook with his research into the periodical’s contents and tacked a large board with Post-It notes, one of them titled “18th Cent Musical,” to develop its structure.

Sketch for Diamond Dogs film project by David Bowie, 1974. Photo: © The David Bowie ArchiveTM.

Though unrealized, these projects offer insight into Bowie’s restless creative mind—how he was “taking ideas and translating them from music to performance,” Haddon said.

Also surprising? Bowie’s collection of fan art and memorabilia. Some of the artworks he received and saved are remarkably accomplished, including an abstract watercolor work painted to mirror Brian Duffy’s contact sheet from the 1973 Aladdin Sane cover shoot and a mechanical sculpture centered on Bowie in his “Ashes to Ashes” Pierrot costume. Williams also told me about a folder of 117 fan letters the musician had preserved for unknown reasons (he obviously received more than 117 fan letters).

David Bowie with Red Steinberger Hohner electric guitar used in the “Valentine’s Day” music video. Photo: Jimmy King © The David Bowie ArchiveTM.

It was also heartening to learn that Bowie, like every other Bowie fan, collected his own merchandise. Trotted out for the preview were boxes and boxes of pins that he had amassed, some of them official and others bootlegged. One of them quotes 1979’s “DJ“: “I am a DJ. I’ve got believers!”

There’s way more that Bowie saved and collected—concepts for music videos, puppets designed by Jim Hensen, jewelry, his cut-up lyrics, the key to his Berlin apartment. The scope of the trove reflects an unendingly curious artist who defied genres and categories. It also reveals one who grasped his own footprint and legacy. His archive, in many ways, emerges as another of his cultural contributions.

“The sheer volume of materials that Bowie saved—from scribbled notes to elaborate concept sketches—is an extremely powerful reminder for everyone that no idea is too small,” said Haddon. “Bowie saw creative processes as worth documenting at every stage, an approach that is a rich legacy for artists of all disciplines.”

The David Bowie Centre at the V&A East Storehouse, Parkes Street, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Hackney Wick, London, opens September 13.