David Bowie's Clothes, Unfinished Projects Go on Display

When David Bowie died in 2016, he left a vast musical legacy—and a trove of unrealized projects. Tantalizing details of those abandoned and unfinished ideas are revealed in Bowie's archive, reports the AP, which opened to the public this week. The 90,000 items acquired from Bowie's estate by London's Victoria and Albert Museum include handwritten notes for a movie in which Major Tom, the fictional astronaut "floating in a tin can far above the world" in Bowie's song "Space Oddity," is sent to "a disgruntled America." Curator Madeleine Haddon said the never-made film—titled Young Americans, like Bowie's 1975 album of the same name—is "reflective on what it's like to be a Brit in the US, and thinking about international politics and their place in the world."

Other might-have-beens include The Spectator, a stage musical about an 18th-century London outlaw that Bowie was working on shortly before his death from cancer in January 2016. It's about "the relationship between art and politics in London at the cusp of modernity," Haddon said Wednesday at a preview of V&A's David Bowie Centre. "I would love to see where he was going with that." The center, which opens Saturday, is a treasure chest for Bowie fans and researchers, holding everything from stage outfits and instruments—a stringed Japanese koto, Ziggy Stardust's acoustic guitar—to letters, lyrics, photos, to-do lists, and idea-filled sticky notes. The archive chronicles decades of restless creativity by the shape-shifting musician, who was born plain old David Jones in the London suburbs in 1947.

The archive occupies part of the V&A East Storehouse, a hybrid warehouse-museum that opened in June in east London's Olympic Park. As with the storehouse as a whole, visitors can book appointments to see any of the items for free—and in many cases handle them, under supervision. "We want visitors to be inspired by Bowie, to pursue their own creativity," Haddon said. The most requested item is a distressed frock coat that Bowie created with Alexander McQueen for his 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Garden in 1997. Also included is a brief rejection letter Bowie received from the Beatles' record label in 1968. "Apple Records is not interested in signing David Bowie," it reads. "The reason is we don't feel he's what we're looking for at the moment."