David Bowie Centre - V&A Announces More Detail, plus The Last Dinner Party and Nile Rodgers

04 July 2025 - Press release

From guest-curated displays to unrealised projects, the V&A announces new details on the David Bowie Centre - opening at the V&A East Storehouse on 13 September 2025

• A new home for David Bowie's archive – V&A East Storehouse's David Bowie Centre – gets visitors closer to Bowie's creative process and legacy than ever before

• Nine displays include unrealised projects and newly uncovered revelations, plus, visitors can book one-on-one time with items from the archive

• Award-winning musician, producer, songwriter and David Bowie collaborator Nile Rodgers and Brit Award-winning indie rock band The Last Dinner Party guest curate a display

• Access to the David Bowie Centre is free and ticketed, with tickets released here later in the year

• The David Bowie Centre Archive was acquired by the V&A through the generosity of the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation, and Warner Music Group

Today, the V&A announces its David Bowie Centre, opening 13 September 2025 at V&A East Storehouse, will feature an exclusive guest-curated display by multiple award-winning musician, producer, songwriter and David Bowie-collaborator, Nile Rodgers, and Brit Award-winning indie rock band, The Last Dinner Party. These intimate selections from Bowie's archive offer new perspectives on one of the most iconic creatives of all time and sit alongside a series of other mini curated displays and installations exploring Bowie's creative legacy and lasting influence.

Visitors to the David Bowie Centre, the new free-to-access working store and permanent home for David Bowie's archive, can also book one-on-one time with their own selections from the 90,000+ items in his archive.

The David Bowie archive was acquired by the V&A through the generosity of the David Bowie Estate, the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group. It joins over 1,000 archives from creative luminaries including Vivien Leigh, the House of Worth, and The Glastonbury Festival Archive.

Nile Rodgers, who produced Bowie's hugely successful single and 1983 album, Let's Dance, as well as 1993's Black Tie White Noise, has written, produced, and performed on records that have sold more than 750 million albums and 100 million singles worldwide. He has curated items reflecting what he calls his and Bowie's shared 'love of the music that had both made and saved our lives.' His selections include:

• A bespoke Peter Hall suit worn by Bowie during the Serious Moonlight tour for the Let's Dance album

• Chuck Pulin photographs of Bowie, Rodgers and guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan recording Let's Dance in New York

• Personal correspondence between Bowie and Rodgers about the 1993 Black TieWhite Noise album

• Peter Gabriel images of the recording sessions with backing vocalists Fonzi Thorton, Tawatha Agee, Curtis King Jr, Denis Collins, Brenda White-King, Maryl Epps, Frank Simms, George Simms, David Spinner, Lamya Al-Mughiery and Connie Petruk recording Black Tie White Noise.

 

Nile Rodgers, said: "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."

The Last Dinner Party is a Brit award-winning band, whose electrifying performance style draws inspiration from their shared love for Bowie. They have selected objects mostly from the 1970s that illustrate how Bowie continues to inspire generations of artists to 'stand up for themselves and their music' and 'steal and reinterpret' to create something unique. Their selection includes:

• Mick Rock photos showing Bowie in intimate recording studio moments

• Bowie's elaborate handwritten lyrics for 'Win' from the 1974 album Young Americans

• Writings and set lists for the Station to Station tour, aka Isolar - 1976 Tour

• Bowie's Electronic Music Studios (EMS) synthesiser user manual. The 'suitcase synth' was used on the albums Low, Heroes and Lodger, the so-called 'Berlin' trilogy.

   

  WATCH The Last Dinner Party on Bowie's influences and their new discoveries

   

Georgia Davies, Lizzie Mayland, Abigail Morris, Aurora Nishevci and Emily Roberts of The Last Dinner Party, said: "David Bowie continues to inspire generations of artists like us to stand up for ourselves. Bowie is a constant source of inspiration to us. 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."

 

CURATED DISPLAYS
The V&A East curatorial team consulted with 18–25-year-olds from the four Olympic Boroughs of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest through London Legacy Development Corporation and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park's Elevate Youth Voice. The resulting displays delve into various elements of Bowie's archive and creative legacy, encompassing everything from private photographs to handwritten lyrics, self-portraits, his own artist's palette, sketches, costumes, and designs.

Nine rotating displays reveal aspects of Bowie's extraordinary creative capacity, including ideas for projects that were never realised. Highlights include an idea to adapt George Orwell's 1984 and unrealised Young Americans and Diamond Dogs films.

Other displays explore Bowie's creation of his iconic personas including Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane and look at his embrace of technology, futurism and science fiction, plus his legendary 1987 Glass Spider tour and concert at the Berlin Wall. Others spotlight Bowie's creative collaborators including Gail Ann Dorsey, and the creation of the 1975 Young Americans album, alongside his wide-spread creative influence and legacy.

 

Madeleine Haddon, Curator, V&A East said: "Bowie embodied a truly multi-disciplinary practice—musician, actor, writer, performer, and cultural icon—reflecting the way many young creatives today move fluidly across disciplines and reject singular definitions of identity or artistry. His fearless engagement with self-expression and performance has defined contemporary culture and resonates strongly with the values of authenticity, experimentation and freedom that we celebrate across the collections at V&A East Storehouse. This archive offers an extraordinary lens through which to examine broader questions of creativity, cultural change, and the social and historical moments during which Bowie lived and worked. In the Centre, we want you to get closer to Bowie, and his creative process than ever before. For Bowie fans and those coming to him for the first time, we hope the Centre can inspire the next generation of creatives."

 

For more information on the David Bowie Centre and to sign-up for updates, please visit: vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/david-bowie-centre.