In the early 1970s, David Bowie built one of rock music’s most striking personas from scratch. Ziggy Stardust was a fictional rock star from outer space — bold, androgynous, and unlike anything mainstream audiences had seen. The 1972 album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ gave the character a full story, with songs about fame, identity, and an imagined future.
Ziggy’s fiery red hair and theatrical costumes were just as important as the music. The visual side of the character demanded designers who could match Bowie’s ambition. That search led him to Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto.
Yamamoto, born in 1944, held his first major London fashion show in 1971 at just 27 years old. Bowie’s management team spotted his work, and Bowie purchased a ‘woodlands animal costume’ from Yamamoto’s London store. He wore it on stage in August 1972. The outfit was so visually powerful that it had to be remade.
Bowie later watched footage of a Yamamoto fashion show staged in Japan. The costumes fused science fiction with traditional Kabuki theater — a classical Japanese dance-drama known for its vivid makeup and exaggerated style. Bowie was immediately drawn to it.
The two men met in New York during Bowie’s second U.S. tour. Yamamoto presented Bowie with two more costumes at that meeting. The collaboration deepened quickly.
Bowie commissioned nine new outfits inspired by Noh drama, another form of classical Japanese theater known for its slow, precise movements and elaborate costuming. These pieces blended male and female design elements into a style that defied easy categorization.
Bowie collected the new costumes in Tokyo in April 1973. These Yamamoto-designed pieces became the defining look of the Ziggy Stardust era — worn throughout Bowie’s third UK tour and now considered landmarks in both fashion and rock history.
