Exhibition – David Bowie is …….

With the news of the V&A’s retrospective of style icon David Bowie selling over 42,000 advance tickets, becoming the museum’s fastest ever exhibition in history it is clear David Bowie’s ten year hiatus from the music scene has left admirers waiting in anticipation for an event of this magnitude.

With the cultural icon’s newest album The Next Day holding the spot as fastest selling UK album this year there is no doubt, Bowie is back where he belongs, on top.

Bowie’s music has stood the test of time throughout his illustrious career: his influence as a truly ground-breaking artist who chose to reach the highest heights of pop icon were on his terms, however, showed the world that sometimes the boundaries that exist within menswear can be challenged without saying a word. In the entrance of the exhibit the Kansai Yamamoto bodysuit is displayed in all its glory. By choosing to wear the Kansai Yamamoto striped bodysuit for his Aladdin Sane Tour in 1973 he exposed men (and women) throughout the world on a new approach to menswear and style, which have evolved from characteristically so-wrong-its-wrong items of clothing – resembling space gear that perhaps astronauts in the next millennium potentially will be inspired by – to more recent ones that have an ironic but welcomed sense of informal containment a in which traces of Bohemian (Berlin) Bowie can still be seen. The earlier way of dressing displayed a sense both of English eccentricity and rebellion as well as a heightened sense of a lifestyle of hedonism and debauchery so many eccentrics of the era displayed.

Another room showing inspirations from literature to art captures a glimpse of Bowie’s wide spanning interest in dissecting cultural phenomenons. Along with Orwell’s 1984 there is a poster of Bowie with American postmodernist author, William Burroughs with the words wild boys in the background, aptly describing the two.

While his clothes were geometric in structure we’ve seen a more toned down look recently. Yet, change is inevitable and in no way in the case of Bowie is there ever a suggestion that he will ever or can ever be boring. Whether you put on your red shoes and dance the blues or not missing out on this retrospective is not an option. Just go! After-all, who better to show us how one can reinvent themselves than the king of reinventing himself. The effect is one of heart-string tugging genius. vam.ac.uk

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