Bowie retrospective reveals the Londoner behind the creative cultural icon
2013-03-18 — /travelprnews.com/ — The Victoria & Albert Museum’s David Bowie exhibition has broken records, even before it opens on Saturday 23rd March 2013. As the most popular in the museum’s history, it is undoubtedly one of the must-see London events this spring.
On display at the South Kensington museum will be more than 60 stage costumes including Ziggy Stardust bodysuits from the 1970s and flamboyant outfits created for the stage personas he invented as well as personal items which never been on public display before. But the exhibition also highlights that Bowie is a Londoner and will no doubt entice visitors to the city where he was born, in Brixton in 1947.
The catalogue of the exhibition provides a handy guide to the key London sites including 23 Heddon Street in central London where a commemorative plaque marks the place where the photographer Brian Ward captured the image of the cover of the 1972 Ziggy Stardust album.
Bowie fans can also follow in his footsteps visiting old haunts he frequented including the Giaconda Coffee Bar in Denmark Street, now the Giaconda Dining Room, and Regent Street’s Café Royal, the historic hotel once frequented by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley. It was in the hotel’s Grill Room – which has recently been restored and reopened – that Bowie partied with Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney after killing off Ziggy Stardust.
Designer Alexander McQueen and milliner Stephen Jones, both alumni of London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins fashion school, worked with Bowie helping to create some of his more outlandish looks, and both have shops in London. Not far McQueen’s Bond Street shop, on New Bond Street, the teenage Bowie got his first job as a trainee visualiser for an advertising agency. Nearby, on Savile Row, is the McQueen menswear shop while and the Stephen Jones Millinery retail boutique can be found at 36 Great Queen Street.
With Bowie on course to go to number one this weekend with his new album, The Next Day, the V&A exhibition couldn’t have been better timed to tie in with a renewed appreciation of the pop and cultural icon who began life as David Robert Jones. Bowie’s surprise release of new single Where Are We Now? on his birthday, on 8th January, was his first in a decade and if the album hits the number one spot it will be his first in 20 years.
For more information on the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A and all other London events taking place this spring go to LondonTown.com where all noteworthy happenings in the city are covered including shop openings, hotel deals, and reviews and booking information on a wide choice of London restaurants including the Denmark Street café where the young Bowie met the musicians who later formed the band the Lower Third, now the Giaconda Dining Rooms.
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