Ziggy, Androgyny, and Subversive Dogs: The Stories Behind David Bowie’s Greatest Album Covers

For his third album, Bowie introduced an androgynous, if not downright feminine, image that really did help sell the world on gender-bending. But not everyone was convinced posing in a dress was the way to break a burgeoning star, which helps explain why The Man Who Sold the World has had four different covers at various times and in various territories. The most official image — used on the original 1971 U.K. release, and for all re-releases around the world from 1990 on — has Bowie reclining on a couch in a dress, dropping a deck of cards onto the floor. Was it, as some said, an evocation of pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti? Or was he going for a Garbo/Dietrich/Bacall old-school Hollywood vibe? As for those other covers: Bowie had originally commissioned a Roy Lichtenstein-style painting of a rifle-toting cowboy who’d shot out a clock tower, before he thought better of it. In America, Mercury went with a modified version of that cartoonish art, allegedly infuriating Bowie. In Germany, there was a far more absurd cartoon image, with Bowie as a celestial angel with a giant hand for a body, about to flick the Planet Earth out of the universe. When Mercury re-released the album in the U.S. in ’72, the label went with a black-and-white photo of Bowie doing a high-kick. Anything to avoid having new fans “not sure if he’s a boy or a girl”!