David Bowie: On Tour opens at V&A Dundee

David Bowie has always felt like a travelling exhibition — costumes, aliases, cities, reinventions — so it is fitting that the archive itself is on the road. On 4 November 2026, David Bowie: On Tour opens at V&A Dundee, the first stop of a V&A UK national tour drawn from the Bowie archive. It remains on the Tay until 15 February 2027 before continuing to Showtown Blackpool, the Bowes Museum in County Durham, Ferens Art Gallery in Hull and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery.

Curator Harriet Reed of V&A Contemporary Performance has shaped more than a hundred highlights into four chapters. Bowie Through a Lens frames the image machine around him. All the Somebody People moves through Ziggy, Berlin, Let’s Dance and Blackstar. Hooked to the Silver Screen turns toward film. I Can’t Give Everything Away gathers the late material that still feels unfinished in the best sense — a goodbye that keeps talking.

Many of the objects have never been shown publicly. Among the draws: a Ziggy-era acoustic guitar making its first display appearance; Natasha Korniloff’s costume from the Ashes to Ashes era; Polaroids of Jareth from Labyrinth; the Grafton Alto saxophone that was Bowie’s first instrument in 1961; handwritten Blackstar lyrics; and a hand-painted Lazarus costume. The mix of cloth, wood, handwriting and photography keeps the show from becoming a waxworks of fame. You are looking at tools and drafts as much as icons.

Dundee is not a random first stop. Bowie played Caird Hall as Ziggy in 1973 and had appeared in the city earlier, in 1966. V&A Dundee director Leonie Bell and V&A director Sir Tristram Hunt have both spoken to the significance of bringing the archive north and then across the country — a national tour rather than a single-city event locked in London. Adult tickets are £10 plus an optional £1 donation; members and under-18s go free with booking, which keeps the door open for the next generation of makeup experiments and bedroom guitarists.

What the exhibition quietly argues is that Bowie’s myth was always material. Sequins, sax keys, Polaroid chemistry, ink on paper. For craft and design readers, that is the real invitation: reinvention as a practice of making, not only of branding. Dundee gets the first look — and then the rest of the UK gets to watch the Thin White Duke keep moving.