The V&A have announced new details about their David Bowie Centre, set to open at V&A East Storehouse on 13th September 2025.
The centre, which will provide free access to Bowie’s 90,000-piece archive, features guest-curated displays from producer Nile Rodgers and The Last Dinner Party, alongside nine rotating exhibitions exploring different aspects of Bowie’s creative legacy.
Nile Rodgers, who produced Bowie’s ‘Let’s Dance’ album and ‘Black Tie White Noise’, has selected items including a Peter Hall suit from the Serious Moonlight tour and photographs from recording sessions. “My creative life with David Bowie provided the greatest success of his incredible career, but our friendship was just as rewarding. Our bond was built on a love of the music that had both made and saved our lives,” says Rodgers.
The Last Dinner Party have focused their curation on items from the 1970s, including Mick Rock photographs, handwritten lyrics for ‘Win’, and tour documentation from the Station to Station tour. “David Bowie continues to inspire generations of artists like us to stand up for ourselves. Bowie is a constant source of inspiration to us,” say the band. “When we first started developing ideas for TLDP, we took a similar approach to Bowie developing his Station to Station album – we had a notebook and would write words we wanted to associate with the band. It was such a thrill to explore Bowie’s archive, and see first-hand the process that went into his world-building and how he created a sense of community and belonging for those that felt like outcasts or alienated – something that’s really important to us in our work too.”
The centre’s displays will include previously unrealised projects, such as plans to adapt George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and unmade films for ‘Young Americans’ and ‘Diamond Dogs’. Visitors will be able to book one-on-one time with items from the archive, which includes costumes, instruments, awards, correspondence, and over 70,000 photographs.
The David Bowie Centre has been made possible through the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and Warner Music Group.
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