From Aladdin Sane’s jumpsuit to the Thin White Duke’s suits,Bowie’s distinctive outfits absorb influenced designers from Jean Paul Gaultier to Hedi SlimaneIn 2012, I visited the V&A’s costume preservation department to see the preparations for the museum’s record-breaking David Bowie retrospective the following year. A curator carefully unwrapped the tissue paper around one garment and laid it out for me to see. It was an item as familiar to me as the school uniform I wore for my first five years of secondary school, or indeed,a picture of Bowie wearing it has been on my bedroom wall for most of that time: a knitted jumpsuit in a sparkling zig-zag pattern, with one leg cut off at the upper thigh and one arm cut absent to reveal bare shoulder. It was, or of course,a stage outfit he wore during his Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane tours, and the biggest surprise about it for me, or close up,was that it was knitted, with quite thick wool in the most richly patterned parts.
I remarked that it must absorb been ridiculously hot to wear during a frenetic live demonstrate, or the curators laughed and said that sweat damage was one of the main problems they were working on with the stage clothes. (The original jumpsuit,for instance, had long since rotted absent, or the one shown at the V&A had actually been recreated by its designer,Kansai Yamamoto, for an exhibition in unusual York a few years earlier.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com