“And so the story goes they wore the clothes, They said the things to make it seem improbable”
Saturday’s edition of the Telegraph Magazine in the UK has an interesting piece wherein Kansai Yamamoto talks about the clothes he designed for Bowie’s Aladdin Sane tour.
He specifically mentions making the asymmetrical woollen creation pictured here, just one of nine costumes that Kansai presented to Bowie in Tokyo on his visit to Japan for nine shows in April 1973.
Coincidentally, the same day the BBC’s Radio 4 broadcast a half hour show entitled: I dressed Ziggy Stardust. (Saturday, Radio 4, 10:30am)
Here’s the synopsis for the programme:
For more than four decades, David Bowie has entranced his followers. As he releases his first new material in ten years, Samira Ahmed looks at his particular appeal for British Asian women.
Across the generations, they have been inspired by the skinny South Londoner who challenged gender barriers and who played with alien identity and other worldliness.
Beneath the make up and exotic costumes, he was also the intelligent, politely spoken suburban young man who you could potentially introduce to your mother.
As Samira explores Bowie’s impact on British Asian teenagers, she talks to Shami Chakrabarti, the Director of ‘Liberty’, about Bowie’s changing identities. Sociologist Rupa Huq tackles his suburban psychoses and Shyama Perera takes Samira on a journey to explain how her teenage obsession with Bowie even extended to sending costume designs to her hero – enabling her arguably to claim that “I Dressed Ziggy Stardust”.
And the outfit Shyama Perera is specifically talking about in the piece, that she feels she may have had a hand in creating? It’s also the one pictured here.
You can read more and listen to I dressed Ziggy Stardust here