David Bowie silver wedding bracelets

When you look at David Bowie’s Ziggy period, which was flamboyant  (lots of colour and patterns, over the top colourful jewellery, and bright makeup), it always seems a bit odd that, in all photographs taken during that era, he was wearing two relatively discreet silver bands on his left arm. They seem out of place, somehow.

Those were his wedding bands. Angie Bowie’s brother was working in Peru at the time of Angie and David’s wedding, and had sent them four as a wedding gift. The bride and groom decided to each wear two, as wedding bracelets.

David wore them 24/7. You can see him quickly removing them to put on a particularly tight outfit in the DVD of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and then putting them back on immediately afterwards. The fans who grabbed onto his arms and legs used to pull them off fairly often but when fans found out they were his wedding bands, they used to return them. Then finally they were not returned, and David had copies made of Angie’s bands, which she was still wearing.

At the point when David and Angie’s marriage was disintegrating, first one silver band was stolen and then the other, and David felt that it signalled the end of his marriage. He told a friend that it was a sign that the marriage was really over.

and below (taken in 1977) there was only one bracelet left.

With Iman, David wore a traditional wedding ring on his left hand, but in photographs taken during the last three years or so, both of them had stopped wearing them. Naturally, I don’t know why, but it often happens in long marriages, particularly when your fingers change shape, or you grow together like vines in your daily life, so physical manifestations of your union are not felt as necessary. I stopped wearing my own wedding ring after about ten years.