David Bowie returns to London as a museum: 90,000 pieces to sanctify Ziggy Stardust

Almost 10 years after his death , David Bowie returns to London today to stay. Not to his hometown of Brixton, which in 1947 was a working-class area still dotted with houses destroyed by German bombing, but to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the brand-new area developed for the 2012 Olympic Games.

In reality, Bowie isn't coming back. When he died of cancer in New York at the age of 69, on January 10, 2015, he was cremated and his ashes were supposedly scattered at sea in Bali, Indonesia. His paraphernalia is back . Which, for an artist who spent his life reinventing himself, adopting different personalities, jumping from musical genre to genre, and even flirting with other forms of artistic expression, is, in fact, David Bowie's second comeback.

And he's back, too, to stay. Not as his fans would have liked—namely, in the form of his 1972 alter ego, ZIggy Stardust —but in an interesting way: divided into perhaps as many particles as his ashes. They are not a material part of him, although they are a part of his creativity. Because Bowie is returning to London in the form of 90,000 objects of all kinds that capture the work of the rocker who earned the nickname " The Chameleon ." The impressive collection will remain permanently in the David Bowie Centre at the Victoria & Albert Museum , the world's largest center for design, applied and decorative arts.

Visitors can also ask for any of these pieces . The keys to Bowie's Berlin apartment? Done. The shoes he wore on this or that tour? Same thing. A letter from Lady Gaga? In a minute. Want to know where Bowie got Major Tom from Space Oddity , Ashes to Ashes , and, many say, the video for his quasi-posthumous Blackstar ? If you go to the V&A and look wherever you need to look, you'll find the answer (hint: look for the script for a movie that was never filmed).

The singer began collecting his own paraphernalia 25 years before his death . He even bid on his memorabilia on the online auction house eBay. This has created a collection—both in terms of the exhibition and the number of pieces to order—that is hard to resist, not only for Bowie fans, but for any fan of popular music. That's why the Victoria & Albert won't be putting any more tickets on sale until October 22 .

Today's opening is a prelude to the long-awaited inauguration of a new section of the Museum in its second location in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a considerable distance—physically and, above all, psychologically—from the Kensington location of the Victoria & Albert that everyone knows, and light years away from the Richmond of today. In a sense, the David Bowie Centre is the gentrification of the artist's legacy, something he himself achieved in life, when he went from representing the avant-garde in the 1970s to becoming an—admittedly eccentric—member of the rock aristocracy in the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of this century.

The project is not only a journey through Bowie's artistic career but also through five decades of popular music . There is, for example, a menu from a Berlin restaurant from the late 1970s , when Bowie lived in the German capital, then a city divided by the Wall that divided Europe and in which the West had fostered youth culture as a way for young people in communist countries to realize what they were missing. The menu has handwritten notes with the preferences of each diner: Bowie , Visconti (presumably Tony, his producer at the time), Pop and Jim . The latter, according to the Daily Telegraph , are the same person: the American James Osterberg, better known as Iggy Pop .

Which raises a question for future generations: Did Iggy Pop eat enough for two people? Knowing his history of excess, it's perfectly possible. Although it's still striking that of the illustrious trio who passed through Berlin in the 1970s—Bowie, Lou Reed , and Iggy Pop—the only one who hasn't succumbed to liver cancer, which is often linked to drug use, is precisely the one who looked the most brutal of the three. David Bowie always had the most sophisticated and, above all, well-maintained image. It was an effort he made during his lifetime and has continued after his death. The David Bowie Centre at the Victoria & Albert Museum is the definitive sanctification of David Bowie to the detriment of Ziggy Stardust.