College Professor Plans to Spend a Year Adopting David Bowie’s Various Guises

Citing a desire to "understand his work from an original angle," a British college professor has embarked upon a yearlong quest to adopt the "dress sense, diet and cultural interests" of each of the many characters David Bowie has inhabited over the course of his career.

The professor, Will Brooker of Kingston University, came up with his plan after being hired to write a study on the singer, which he's titled "Forever Stardust" after Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona. Aside from dressing and acting like the various facets of Bowie's musical personality, Brooker's also traveling to the locations that inspired them; according to the NME, he's already visited several, with plans to make his way to Berlin next month.

"If you’re reading some strange science-fiction and books about magic, you can kind of get into Bowie’s head and see it’s sometimes quite a strange place," said Brooker. "A dangerous place, a place you wouldn’t want to live too long. "So it’s fortunate that I’m going through his career chronologically. Because I think by ’83, he was pretty clean. I think I’ll get a tan, get fit, get my hair changed again, get my teeth whitened."

As for what Bowie might think of the project, Brooker surmised, "I hope he would be interested in and amused by my research. I do feel, though, that everything he says and does in public is performance, so if he did hear about it, we would be unlikely to know what he genuinely thought." To stay abreast of Brooker's project, follow him on Twitter.

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