David Bowie's 90,000-item personal archive has a new home. Here's a look inside

'So here we have the Alexander McQueen coat that David Bowie and McQueen designed together for the Earthling album and tour… This is the synthesiser that he used with Brian Eno during the Berlin trilogy… We have the crystal ball from Labyrinth that was used on set… A photograph of Bowie as Andy Warhol on the set of Basquiat…'

Here in the heart of the V&A East Storehouse in the Olympic Park in East London, in one cabinet alone, we see the worlds of the man. The fashion designer. The musical innovator. The wearer of crazy wigs in films both fantastical and arthouse. Then, in the adjacent cabinet, we see another David Bowie: the reject and failure.

'Dear Sir,' begins a letter, dated 15 July 1968, to his manager. 'As we told you on the phone, Apple Records is not interested in signing David Bowie. The reason is that we don’t feel he is what we’re looking for at the moment.' Peter Asher, brother of Jane and Head of A&R at The Beatles’ record label, clearly didn’t have time for this jumped-up 21-year-old South Londoner.

'Here we’re speaking to how creative genius and works of art don't just happen overnight,' head curator Dr. Madeleine Haddon continues as we take a tour of nine towering display cases. 'It takes trial and error and perseverance and works-in-progress. And you can trace that story throughout his archive.'

This, brilliantly, is what the newly opened David Bowie Centre does. As we approach the 10th anniversary of his death, it shows us everything, every facet, every age, of the musician-and-more. It’s housed within V&E East, the purpose-built home for the museum’s collections across art, design and performance – some half-a-million creative works, previously stored in Kensington Olympia but now relocated across the capital and put on display for the public’s perusal and inspection.

The 90,000-plus items in the ticketed but free-to-enter Bowie archive are equally accessible, and – like the artist at the heart of it – equally wondrous in their range. Bowie was an inveterate curator – you might say hoarder – of his own life, keeping every quicksilver fashion statement, every scrap of paper, every piece of memorabilia, amassing a deeply personal life-map that accompanies the Centre’s 70,000 photographs, negatives and colour transparencies. So, alongside the rejection letters are fan correspondence that he kept with equal assiduousness.

'Dear David Bowie,' writes the woman who signs her name Gaga and whose Haus of Gaga stationery is itself a design marvel, 'it was truly an honor to receive an advanced copy of your new album. I cried, in fact, listening to each song. How does he know I exist?'

Then there are the costumes. So many costumes – 400 in total – that some need to hang from the rafters, racked in see-through dry-cleaning bags. 'Suit designed by Freddie Burretti for Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, 1972.' 'Wedding suit designed by Thierry Mugler for Bowie, 1992.' 'Costume designed by Ola Hudson for Bowie as The Thin White Duke, 1976.' That’s Ola Hudson, former lover of Bowie and mother of Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash.

In a side-room – still within earshot of the specially-commissioned, two-hour Bowie performance movie that plays on a giant screen – I meet gloved curators Sabrina Offord and Harriet Reed. They carefully unbox items that, using V&A East’s open-to-all browsing tool, I’ve pre-selected for a closer look.

'This is the Ziggy Stardust day-wear outfit,' Reed says, gently unfolding an Issey Miyake cropped jumper in plum, accessorised with blue cotton trousers that can only be described as pantaloons. Even the lining, a patchwork of red, yellow and green, is a fashion statement worthy of a bisexual, androgynous Martian messiah.

As it was with Bowie, so attention to detail here is everything. Offord carefully unpeels early proof copies of the artwork for his 1977 album Low. Only it wasn’t called Low then, it was called New Music: Night And Day, and the cover image wasn’t a shot of Bowie in profile but his sketching of a small, David Jones-esque boy.

This 'order-an-object' service is free for visitors, but the curators will decide on a case-by-case basis whether items are too fragile for handling. In the look-but-don’t-touch category: Bowie’s jumbo Harptone acoustic 12-string guitar, as played during the Ziggy shows. In the look-and-gently-touch category: 'looming on a mannequin,' as Reed puts it, is a skirt and bodice-like tuxedo in PVC and velour, which Bowie wore on Saturday Night Live in 1979. 'It was designed by Mark Ravitz but based on a Sonia Delaunay design for a production of a 1920s play,' explains Reed. 'So very much inspired by Dada, and which then went on to aspire Klaus Nomi, the cabaret performer.'

Just as Bowie’s influence spun onwards and outwards, so does this Centre. On and on (and on) the collection goes, an Aladdin Sane’s cave of joy and art and quirk: the badges, the Post-It notes for his unrealised '18th Cent. Musical', the stack-heeled clogs from New York’s Pelican Footwear, the Berlin apartment keys, the handwritten notes from Nile Rodgers from the Let’s Dance recording sessions, the Bowie puppet head crafted by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.

What do the curators, who’ve been immersed in here for the best part of three years, like the most? Reed and Offord both plump for the ideas that didn’t come to pass.

'I love the unfinished costumes,' says Reed, 'because it's the sense of a creative transition. We don't know why he abandoned a certain jacket, or tunic or cape. But we can imagine all these alternate versions of his characters – and they're all on the catalogue and available to order.'

'I like the unrealised film projects that he was coming up with,' says Offord, 'like The Catastrophe Cabinet. It's got real Twilight Zone vibes. I would have loved to have seen that.'

That David Bowie. If only he could have realised his potential.

The David Bowie Centre opens on 13th September. Information and tickets here