Oh! You pretty thing

David Bowie burst onto the international scene at a pivotal point in modern sexual history. The heady utopian dreams of the 1960s, which saw free love as an agent of radical political change, were evaporating. Generational solidarity was proving illusory, while experimentation with psychedelic drugs had expanded identity but sometimes at a cost of disorientation and paranoia.

By the early 1970s hints of decadence and apocalypse were trailing into popular culture. Bowie’s prophetic attunement to this shift was registered in his breakthrough song, Space Oddity, whose wistful astronaut, Major Tom, secedes from Earth itself. Recorded several months before the Woodstock music festival in 1969, Space Oddity, with its haunting isolation and asexual purity and passivity, forecast the end of the carnival of the Dionysian 1960s.

Like Oscar Wilde, who freelanced as a fashion journalist, Bowie is a dandy for whom costume is an art form. He regarded himself as an