This morning, while the sky in New York was still dark, news broke that David Bowie, born David Robert Jones, had died shortly after his 69th birthday. His most recent album, Blackstar, released just days ago, revealed itself as a parting gift. The critically acclaimed seven-song work is the latest chapter of the artist’s extraordinary legacy—a final missive from the boy from Brixton who managed to put his fingerprint on everything from the way we dance down to the hair on our heads.
During Bowie’s intellectually promiscuous career, which spanned half a century and comprised 27 studio albums, 14 tours, and 22 films (to name a few of his creative contributions), his visual range was diverse and reverberating. “He crossed so many creative boundaries,” Celia Philo, the graphic designer who worked with Bowie to conceptualize his influential Aladdin Sane album cover, told Vogue.com in 2014. “He understood that the way you looked was as important as the music.”
Beyond assuming a single iconic persona in the manner of Mick Jagger or Jimi Hendrix, Bowie once described himself as an artist “who tries to capture the rate of change,” utilizing shifts in hair and makeup with unprecedented speed; by eschewing his boy-next-door image for 1972’s larger-than-life androgyne Ziggy Stardust, with his Suzy Fussey–cut-and-colored flaming red hair, sculptural Kansai Yamamoto costumes, and Pierre La Roche–designed celestial makeup, he catapulted into stardom.
It was only the beginning of the artist’s foray into chameleonlike experimentation, which included characters like the lightning-struck Aladdin Sane; the two-toned, slick-haired Thin White Duke; and, perhaps most unexpectedly, the squeaky-clean citizen in his late 70s Berlin years. Such image reinventions were products of the musician’s early aspirations to be a painter, his 1960s training as a mime with Lindsay Kemp, and his studies of kabuki makeup with Bando Tamasaburo V, Japan’s most famous onnagata. “It was like being in the room with an exotic animal,” remembered Philo.
Often credited as cofounding glam rock, Bowie had a penchant for mixing the strange with the beautiful that was felt immediately in London. “It was the pre-punk era,” said Philo. “His image liberated young people who were just waiting to think outside the box.” This morning she added, “He made [it] possible for young people to go to areas that might have been taboo before, [giving them the] freedom to express themselves sexually, with makeup, in music, artistically, in dress—it wouldn’t have happened without Bowie.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, who told the BBC today, “Bowie was like a lighthouse that guided those people and made them feel it was all right to be different, to try things out and dye your hair and wear strange clothes. I think people feel it very personally because he was very important in how people grew up.” A look at your Twitter feeds this morning will strengthen Cocker’s case: As Madonna Instagrammed, “This great Artist changed my life!”
If the Man Who Fell to Earth has left us, his impact can be seen among the rule-benders and pop’s beauty chameleons of today who keep us guessing with their shape-shifting looks: Before there was Lady Gaga, Rihanna, or even Beyoncé, there was David Bowie. Here, in honor of his legacy, a look back at his most memorable hair and makeup transformations.
The post Remembering David Bowie, the Ultimate Beauty Chameleon appeared first on Vogue.
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