Five must-have items for the V&A's latest centre

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has announced the opening of a brand new David Bowie Center for the Performing Arts in 2025 on the V&A East Storehouse in east London. This follows news the museum received – through donation – the artist’s legendary archive.

This collection of over 80,000 objects formed the premise of the museum's 2013 exhibition David Bowie is. It includes personal correspondence, lyric sheets, photographs, costumes, sets, music awards, movies, album covers, instruments and plans for unrealized projects.

The exhibition's curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, described it as “one of the most comprehensive, if not the most complete, archives of any popular music artist” of all time.

In 2020 it was me instructed after much research to publish David Bowie's Cambridge Companion The artists (often ghostly) presence in each contemporary theater And Current cinema.

Here are my five Bowie treasures, with a playlist that expresses his playful curiosity about how we occupy our bodies and genders, his delicate sensitivity to our need for beauty, and his passionate respect for style.

1. Jockstraps

During the Ziggy Stardust tour in 1973 Masayoshi Sukita photographed a almost naked Bowie Performing in front of an excited Japanese audience wearing nothing but one jockstrap.

This piece of sports equipment is so reminiscent homosocial energies of sport and from Working class culturecreates an irreverent tension with the androgyny and strangeness of the costumes dressmaker Kansai Yamamoto created for a similar tour.

Bowie was at his best strange in trading images of iconic, traditional (and very vulnerable) masculinity. Other notable accessories include the red boxing gloves he wore during live performances of his 1973 track “Panic” in Detroit and the darker gloves he wears on the quilt of 1983's “Let's Dance.”

2. The Hammersmith Odeon dressing table from 1973

In Ziggy Stardust: The Movie, Donn Alan Pennebaker's 1973 documentary about Bowie's final Ziggy performance, we see the artist preparing for the stage. As he sits in front of a dressing table with a mirror, his make-up artist applies blush, eye shadow and eyeliner, transforming him from a pale young man right into a female icon.

I need the brand new center to copy the dressing table: the 2 bottles of wine (one opened), the white plastic cups, the tissue boxes, the massive can of hairspray, the container of Johnson & Johnson baby powder, the well-used green ashtray.

This gentle display of the on a regular basis paraphernalia of Nineteen Seventies femininity testifies to Bowie's lifelong preoccupation with what English literary expert Shelton Walderp calls “on.” “Aesthetics of self-invention”starting from Bowie back to Oscar Wilde and beyond to Shakespeare and Japanese Kabuki theater.

3. Bowie's copy of George Orwell's “1984” – and other books

An installation within the 2013 V&A show featured a faceless mannequin with arms outstretched, high up within the room. It was wrapped in a cape that Yamamoto designed in 1973, a white, floor-length garment made in Japan Japanese Hikinuki tradition and designed to be ripped off on stage during a fast costume change. It is decorated in red and black Kanji which translates to “one who spits out words fiery.”

That's why, like so many flying birds, there have been around 20 books from Bowie's personal library by authors akin to RD Laing, Vladimir Nabokov and Hubert Selby Jr. hanging on the V&A.

I would really like to see Bowie's copy of George Orwell's 1984 feature film – a novel I read once I was 12 after hearing that Bowie wrote a musical based on it. Also, every thing he owned belonged to the French author Jean Genet, whose name inspired the title of the 1972 single “The Jean Genie” and whose last book, “Prisoner of Love” (1986), inspired the song of the identical name that Bowie recorded with Tin Machine in 1989 .

4. The Hedi Slimane three-piece suit – and other blue suits

On “Sound and Vision” from 1977, Bowie famously sung:

Blue, blue, electric blue
This is the colour of my room

This sentiment agrees with the filmmaker, Derek Jarman's own tackle color (in Chroma: A Book of Color):

Blue, an open door to the soul
An infinite possibility
Become tangible

Bowie greatly admired Jarman, an excerpt from his film Blue, was played in the course of the pre-show music for the 1995 Outside tour. Like Jarman, Bowie loved the colour blue, perhaps because he knew how good he looked in it.

Like he did within the turquoise suit Freddi Burretti designed for his life on Mars in 1973? video, whose vibrant hue reflected Bowie's eye makeup; or Peter Hall's powder blue suit, an everyday on the 1983 Serious Moonlight tour; and the gorgeous Hedi Slimane-designed petrol blue three-piece suit he wore on his 2002 Heathen tour.

5. The white Supro guitar – and other instruments

One of probably the most compelling photos within the David Bowie Is catalog is that this white Supro 1961 Dual Tone Electric guitar that Bowie played on his final tour in support of the 2003 Reality album. The image stays emblematic of Bowie's persistent commitment to the chances and actual music-making.

These could be other notable instruments 12-string acoustic guitar he applied throughout his profession; The Japanese koto he plays on the 1977 track Moss Garden; The saxophone he had played since his youth; and the harmonicas that accompanied him from 1969's Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed to 2016's I Can't Give Everything Away, the ultimate track on Blackstar, his final album.