Reliving David Bowie's Ever-Morphing Style

Exhibition honoring musician makes its final stop

by Carlton L. English, AARP, April 9, 2018

As the exhibition “David Bowie Is” makes its final stop at the Brooklyn Museum, we take a look back at Bowie’s chameleon-like looks. After touring globally for the past five years, the exhibition that explores Bowie’s creative process as an artist will wrap up on July 15, 2018.

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PHOTO BY: Potter/Express/Getty Images

Introducing David Bowie

In 1965, a young, London-born musician named David Jones briefly became Davy Jay to avoid being confused with another, soon-to-be famous Davy Jones (of The Monkees). A childhood interest in the American West and the Bowie knife would ensure the 17-year-old would be known as David Bowie.

Season 1 (HBO, Sunday, Feb. 18, 10 p.m./9 CT)
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PHOTO BY: Masayoshi Sukita, Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive

Supernova

"I’m going to be huge, and it’s quite frightening in a way.” David Bowie may not have created glam rock, but with the release of 1972’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, he became its personification. On stage, Ziggy became the singer’s androgynous alter ego, triggering a cosmic shift in live performing still being felt today.
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PHOTO BY: Max B. Miller/Fotos International/Getty Images

The Thin White Duke

If Ziggy Stardust was from another planet, then Bowie’s last musical persona, the Thin White Duke, was very much of this world. 1976’s Station to Station introduced the detached, icy cool, European aristocrat with a penchant for Nietzsche, cocaine, fascism and funk.
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PHOTO BY: Masayoshi Sukita, Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive

Inventing the Future

1977, Berlin, a city divided by a wall, accurately reflected Bowie’s own inner turmoil. While renting a seven-room flat above a car repair shop, the musician composed Low, Heroes and Lodger; three experimental, electronic albums now known as Bowie’s “Berlin Trilogy,” which became a musical roadmap for 1980s synth pop.
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PHOTO BY: Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive

Let’s Dance

Selling nearly 11 million copies worldwide, Bowie most commercially successful album, 1983’s Let’s Dance, was rooted in the early R&B of his youth. After showing the album’s producer, Nile Rodgers, a photograph of Little Richard in a red suit getting into a bright red Cadillac, Bowie commented, "Nile, darling, that's what I want my album to sound like."
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PHOTO BY: Courtesy of Peter Gabriel

Black Tie, White Noise

Many critics have described the album Black Tie, White Noise, released in 1993, as a wedding gift to his supermodel wife, Iman. “Heaven’s girl in a wedding gown, angel for life,” croons Bowie on The Wedding Song. Another track, Jump They Say, expresses Bowie’s emotions about his half-brother’s 1985 suicide. The song was “semi-based on my impression of my stepbrother,” said Bowie at the time.

10 p.m./9 CT
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PHOTO BY: Allstar Picture Library/Alamy

Bowie at 50

In 1997, David Bowie celebrated his 50th birthday in style, performing in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden. “I think the internal and exterior values in my life have kind of leapfrogged over each other into a more positive area,” said Bowie, pictured here at the very un-Bowie unveiling of his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles.
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PHOTO BY: Nicky J. Sims/Redferns/Getty Images

Bowie.Net

Always ahead of the curve, Hours, Bowie’s most introspective album to date, became the first album by a major artist available to download over the internet, prior to its physical release in stores. In 1999, the musician launched his own internet service provider, Bowie.Net. “We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying,” explained Bowie in 1999. “The interplay between the user and the provider will be so in simpatico it’s going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about."
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PHOTO BY: Dave Hogan/Getty Images

Homecoming

Dressed in a Pre-Raphaelite-styled coat designed by Alexander McQueen, Bowie’s Glastonbury Festival performance in 2000 (he's pictured here backstage) is now legendary. “He’s one of the three greatest of all-time: Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and David Bowie,” said the event’s organizer, Michael Eavis. In front of an audience estimated at 100,000, Bowie had come full circle, having performed at the first Glastonbury Festival nearly 30 years earlier.
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PHOTO BY: Courtesy of Columbia Records

Bright Blackstar

Blackstar, released only days before David Bowie’s death in 2016, was described by coproducer Tony Visconti as Bowie's intended swan song and a "parting gift" for his fans. With Blackstar, Bowie delved into his own mortality in the manner he knew best — music. Bowie’s last album was his first jazz album. The alto saxophone was the first instrument the 14-year-old David Jones learned to play, so Blackstar may have also been a parting gift to himself, taking him back to the beginning.
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