Over 80,000 items spanning six decades of David Bowie's career to be made available to the public

The Victoria & Albert Museum has announced it will secure the archive of David Bowie for the nation – revealing the creative processes of one of the most pioneering and influential figures in the history of live and recorded music, film, fashion and beyond. 

Image: David Bowie as The Thin White Duke, Station to Station Tour, 1976 © John Robert Rowlands.jpg

From 2025, the archive will be made available to the public, from fans to school children and researchers, through the creation of The David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts at V&A East Storehouse, in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The acquisition and creation of The Centre has been made possible thanks to the David Bowie Estate and a generous donation of £10m from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group.

Encompassing more than 80,000 items, the archive traces Bowie’s creative processes as a musical innovator, cultural icon, and advocate for self-expression and reinvention from his early career in the 1960s to his death in 2016. Alongside the creation of the new Centre, the gift will support the ongoing conservation, research, and study of the archive.

Spanning Bowie’s career, the archive features handwritten lyrics, letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments, album artwork and awards. It also includes more intimate writings, thought processes and unrealised projects, the majority of which have never been seen in public before.

Image: Striped bodysuit for Aladdin Sane tour, 1973 Design by Kansai Yamamoto Photograph by Masayoshi Sukita © Sukita The David Bowie Archive 2012.

Highlights include stage costumes such as Bowie’s breakthrough Ziggy Stardust ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti (1972), Kansai Yamamoto’s flamboyant creations for the Aladdin Sane tour (1973) and the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for the Earthling album cover (1997). The archive also includes handwritten lyrics for songs including Fame (1975), “Heroes” (1977) and Ashes to Ashes (1980), as well as examples of the “cut up” method of writing introduced to Bowie by the writer William Burroughs. Additionally, the archive holds a series of intimate notebooks from every era of Bowie’s life and career.

The archive also includes a photo collage of film stills from The Man Who Fell to Earth (1975-76), directed by Nicolas Roeg and featuring Bowie, and over 70,000 photographs, prints, negatives, large format transparencies, slides and contact sheets taken by some of the 20th century’s leading photographers from Terry O’Neill to Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton. Among other highlights are instruments, amps, and other equipment, including Brian Eno’s EMS Synthesizer from Bowie’s seminal Low (1977) and “Heroes” albums and a Stylophone – a gift from Marc Bolan in the late 1960’s, used on Bowie’s seminal Space Oddity recording.

The David Bowie Archive joins the V&A’s Theatre & Performance collections, which includes the archives of influential individuals and organisations, from Vivien Leigh to Peter Brook, Akram Khan Dance Company, The Royal Court Theatre and Glastonbury Festival. The acquisition follows the V&A’s ground-breaking 2013 exhibition, David Bowie Is…, which marked the first time a museum had been given unprecedented access to the David Bowie Archive. The exhibition was seen by over two million people around the world as part of its international tour, becoming one of the V&A’s most popular exhibitions of all time.