Bowie Style

2.1
Ziggy Stardust
The creation of Ziggy Stardust was, wrote
Bowie’s ex-wife Angie in Backstage Passes, “the
first emphatic act in a great liberation”. The focal
point was Bowie’s ‘cockade orange’, the feather-cut
from hell (or maybe Mars) that was conceived at
Haddon Hall by Susie Fussey, a stylist from a local
hairdresser’s salon in Beckenham High Street, and
held in place with a few generous squirts of a
popular anti-dandruff treatment called Guard.
Angie described the Ziggy barnet as “the single
most reverberant fashion statement of the
Seventies” and for once her unquenchable thirst for
exaggeration was justified. “He looked just as
ambivalently enticing as he had with his long blond
hippie hair,” Angie maintained, “but this new,
streamlined red puffball upped the ante. Now he
looked stronger and wilder; just as fuckable, but a lot
stranger and, well, more sluttish.”
Years later, Bowie acknowledged that Ziggy’s
wardrobe – which he once described as “a cross
between Nijinsky and Woolworth’s” – had been a
steal from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
“The jumpsuits in that I thought were just wonderful,
and I liked the malicious, malevolent, vicious quality