What David Bowie’s Badges Preserve—and What the Archive Cannot Yet Tell Us

A badge is designed to travel. Pinned to a jacket or bag, it turns an image into an affiliation: portable, inexpensive and publicly worn. Inside the David Bowie Archive at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, however, badges have stopped circulating. Their new work is archival. They preserve traces of how Bowie’s personae moved among official promotion, fan culture, professional encounters and private acts of making.

On July 27, 2026, V&A project archivist Holly Stepp published an account of badges held within the archive. The selection ranges from official items associated with *Let’s Dance*, *Scary Monsters… and Super Creeps* and BowieNet to fan-made objects responding to Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, *Lodger* and “Heroes.” There are badges connected to the *Starzone* and *Bowie Friends* fanzines, as well as a pin from the 17th Annual Grammy Awards, where Bowie presented Aretha Franklin with the award for Best Rhythm and Blues Performance by a female artist in 1975.

This is a curatorial presentation of catalogued material, not the announcement of a newly discovered cache. That distinction matters. The V&A says the wider David Bowie Archive contains approximately 90,000 items documenting his professional life, including lyrics, costumes, instruments, sketches, photographs and collected material. Its badges were often filed thematically with album, stage, theatre or film projects according to their imagery. The archive’s structure therefore does more than locate an object: it begins to interpret it.

The most intriguing example is also among the least fully explained. A homemade badge catalogued as DBA/2/1/7/1 bears the phrase “2 wild boys” and an image of Bowie with William S. Burroughs. The V&A attributes its making to Bowie, describing it as a Terry O’Neill photograph cut from a contact sheet and coloured with felt-tip pen. O’Neill photographed Bowie and Burroughs in 1974; an image from that session accompanied their interview in a February issue of *Rolling Stone*.

If the catalogue attribution is correct, the badge reverses a familiar flow of imagery. Bowie was not simply the subject reproduced by merchandise makers or admirers. He also handled, altered and recirculated his own representation, joining his image to that of a writer whose cut-up technique he used. The object would then sit somewhere between collage, keepsake and self-authored insignia.

The available account does not establish what object-level documentation supports the attribution to Bowie’s hand. That does not make the attribution implausible, but it leaves a meaningful gap between a catalogue description and demonstrated authorship. The same caution applies elsewhere in the collection. Records from Bowie’s team, as reported by the V&A, state that most badges other than retained official merchandise were sent to his office. Yet the routes taken by individual fan-made objects—who made them, when they arrived and whether Bowie personally encountered them—remain unresolved.

Those gaps are part of the story rather than obstacles to it. Official, fan-made, commemorative and potentially unauthorized objects can appear nearly equivalent once reduced to catalogue entries and accession numbers. In use, however, those categories describe different relationships. An official badge projects an approved identity. A fanzine badge helps a community recognize itself. A commemorative pin records participation in an event or workplace. According to the V&A, Bowie gave a rocket pin to each member of the cast and crew at the opening of *Lazarus*, turning a small object into a marker of shared production. The exact date and venue associated with the pin in file DBA/4/1/36 are not specified in the supplied record.

The term “bootleg,” which the V&A applies to some material, raises another unresolved issue. Without knowing which objects receive that designation or how the catalogue defines it, the word could describe unauthorized manufacture, informal circulation or both. Each meaning would shape how an object is understood.

What the badges establish most clearly is not a complete chain of provenance but a field of exchange. Bowie’s changing personae supplied visual identities that could be reproduced and altered cheaply. Fans returned those identities in handmade form; official channels standardized them as merchandise; professional occasions converted them into tokens of participation. Eventually, the museum gathered these different kinds of objects under one archival system.

Their art-historical interest lies precisely in that movement. A badge may have little material grandeur, yet it can retain evidence of identification, labour and social connection that conventional hierarchies of fine art often miss. The archive preserves the object. Its catalogue proposes a context. Between the two remain questions about authorship, authorization and passage—questions that reveal how much cultural meaning can accumulate on something made to fit in the palm of a hand.