Are you of the opinion that we should own more of David Bowie? That really, he should have left more of himself behind? Yeah, he gave us 27 record-breaking albums, appeared in 28 iconic films and spent five decades crafting a legacy that would shape pop culture forever, but can we truly say, with absolute conviction, that it feels like “enough”? What about the physical remnants of David Bowie? Didn’t he leave any of his body parts for us, as a gift? What about, for instance… his hair? Can we not keep a piece of his hair? Not much, just 2 inches. Can we not just have 2 inches of David Bowie’s hair?! No, it’s not creepy at all. It’s perfectly normal to want to own a piece of somebody’s hair and keep it forever and ever. Stop looking at me like that. Just give me the hair.
See, somebody is actually auctioning off a piece of David Bowie’s hair. The seller is a wigmaker who worked at Madame Tussauds in the eighties (see? we knew they stored famous people’s hair) and she has decided, after three decades, that she no longer wants the hair she chopped off Bowie’s head. She wants a couple of grand instead. She has had more than enough time to stare at and sniff another person’s amputated protein filaments, and now, she says, it’s somebody else’s turn.
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“I was employed by Madame Tussauds as a wigmaker from 1981-1986,” she explains in a letter to buyers on the Heritage Auctions website. She then goes on to say that her employees knew she was a huge David Bowie fan, so they let her take the hair samples when he came for a sitting in 1983. “The samples were large enough to make a colour match and I was very careful not to take them from obvious areas!” she writes. “I remember Mr Bowie being very relaxed about the whole episode as I approached with scissors quivering!”
So, if you have a few grand in the bank, and want a physical piece of David Bowie to keep in a glass box and stare at every evening, or stir into your soup and drink, or crush up and snort or whatever, then please, be my guest and go ahead.
Here is a photograph of the hair clump, which you can also stare at, and imagine that you own.
