Even before he discovered his vivid alter egos, David Jones was a snappy dresser with a taste for flamboyant lapels and statement hair. Clothes, as he quickly established, were a strategic means of self-expression. Once he began studying mime and dance, fashion, together with an on-point haircut and psychedelic makeup, would play a huge part in his transformation into an artist.It was through his clothes that in 1973, thousands of teenagers came to know David Bowie. W hen the songs came together with that blazing red mullet and the Aladdin Sane lightning flash, you knew you were in the presence of something thrillingly odd.It was one of those rare moments when the zeitgeist, politics and exploding social mores manifest themselves in a singular, decorative image. It's that cultural white heat that allows Aladdin Sane to resonate even now, inspiring two Kate Moss-as-David-Bowie Vogue covers alone .For Aladdin Sane 's 1973 tour, Bowie collaborated with designer Kansai Yamamoto on a jumpsuit with vast, orbicular legs .The stretch knit unitard he wore as Ziggy Stardust was another eye-popping Top of the Pops moment. Watching Bowie smash elegantly through another social taboo often seemed like watching history in the making.The unitard ignited one of London's many fashion revivals, even though Bowie himself soon moved on to Berlin and then the US. Not that leaving London stymied his style. Bowie fashion influences include arresting nail colours (still a huge trend in 2016), swooping blue eyeshadow (ditto), wedge-blonde hairdos and razor-sharp tailoring, on men and women.And the list of beneficiaries of Bowie inspiration goes on. Madonna, Kate Bush, Moss, Lady Gaga, Florence, Jean Paul Gaultier, Balmain and many more have openly paid homage to his influence.story_article_left1One of the most striking aspects of the 2013 blockbuster V&A Bowie retrospective was how teeny his clothes were. When Moss collected the best male solo artist award at the Brits the following year on his behalf, she wore one of his romper-suits: the man who confessed that at one point in his life, he had survived on "red peppers, cocaine, and milk" often resembled nothing so much as an etiolated, electrified streak.Bowie' s cultural vampirism - he cherry-picked from Pop Art, Dadaism, Brechtian and Japanese theatre, and sci-fi and breathed fresh life into them - helped join the dots between fashion and art .Without doubt, however, it's Bowie's androgyny that has had the most lasting footprint.His gender fluidity managed to shock because it wasn't mere posturing. With breathtaking insouciance, he flouted his bisexuality.Somehow he escaped getting beaten to a pulp, possibly because, as an early school report noted, along with being "vividly artistic", he was a gifted brawler.Besides, for all the chauvinistic swagger of the '70s, there was also a blossoming of sexual and artistic experimentation.As the shock impact of Ziggy and Aladdin waned, Bowie skilfully manipulated the ostensibly conventional. Two decades after Ziggy, he sang at the Brits, a picture of establishment elegance in an impeccable dark, slim suit - until your eye snagged on those kitten heels.He began wearing those sharp-edged suits in the late '70s. With their '40s gangster angles they were simultaneously polite and menacing - and they set the sartorial course for millions of yuppies in the loadsamoney decade that followed.That may not have been Bowie's intention. His aim, in the early days at least, was to depict a solitary, alienated figure in a dystopian world. His genius meant he reached out to millions.sub_head_start David Bowie: some of the facts sub_head_endHe voiced a character in a 'SpongeBob SquarePants' movieBowie provided the voice of the long-nosed, blue-skinned, stiletto-sporting Atlantean king Lord Royal Highness in the 2007 TV movie SpongeBob's Atlantis SquarePantis . "I've hit the Holy Grail of animation gigs," Bowie wrote at the time. "Yesterday I got to be a character on ... tan-tara ... SpongeBob SquarePants . Oh Yeah!! We, the family, are thrilled. Nothing else need happen this year, well, this week anyway."Bowie appeared in over 25 films, including The Last Temptation of Christ as Pontius Pilate.He was nominated for an MTV award for his cameo in 'Zoolander'"If nobody has any objections, I believe I might be of service?" In one of the best movie cameos ever committed to film, Bowie pops up to judge a "walk-off" between warring models Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) and Hansel McDonald (Owen Wilson) in Stiller's beautifully ridiculous 2001 comedy.He changed his name (David Robert Jones) to avoid confusion with Davy Jones of The MonkeesOtherwise, we'd have always struggled to tell the two apart.He had a tea phobiaBowie reportedly had a "horrible incident" with a cup of tea when he was five years old. According to a widely reported internet rumour, he had been unable to drink it ever since.He suffered repeatedly from eye issuesmini_story_image_vright1Bowie's right pupil was permanently dilated: his friend, the artist George Underwood, punched him while they were both at school (in a fight over a girl) and accidentally sliced his eye with a fingernail.The injury gave rise to the rumour that Bowie had heterochromia, a condition in which a person's eyes are naturally different in colour.In 2004, he was hit in the eye with a lollipop, thrown at the stage as he performed in Oslo, Norway. It became stuck, but a member of Bowie's crew eventually managed to remove it (and Bowie bravely continued with the show).He had a taste for jazzAs a teenager Bowie was a fan of jazz and Charles Mingus. He used to play jazz on tenor and alto saxophone. In the early '80s, he once danced with Princess Diana to a concert by jazz singer George Melly with his Feetwarmers band.He was friends with Elton John (before Elton John was Elton John)When he was 17, Bowie (who was then still David Jones) loved meeting his friend Reginald Kenneth Dwight (later Elton John) at Soho's Giaconda Cafe, to talk about music.He tried to send a pig foetus to Rolling StoneIn a nice way, of course.Back in the '90s, while being interviewed by the magazine's David Wild, Bowie saw that the singer Tom Petty had sent the journalist a gift. Feeling that he, too, should thank the writer for his time, Bowie tried to send him an unborn piglet, sealed in a jar."The border police, they absolutely shut it down, and it never got to me. But there were weeks and weeks of [Bowie] checking in to see if a pig foetus had ever arrived," Wild said years later. "I personally was actually very glad it never came."He turned down a knighthoodBowie was offered a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth in 2003, but turned it down, saying: "I would never have any intention of accepting anything like that. I seriously don't know what it's for. It's not what I spent my life working for."His Ziggy Stardust alter ego 'drove him insane'Bowie toured as the character Ziggy Stardust (with his backing band the Spiders from Mars) from 1972-73, before retiring the persona live on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon in June 1973. Bowie later said the alter ego "wouldn't leave me alone for years. That was when it all started to go sour ... My whole personality was affected. It became very dangerous. I really did have doubts about my sanity."He once went on TV to defend his hairstyleIn 1964, Bowie defended his hairstyle in an interview with the BBC as the 17-year-old founder of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-haired Men. He said: "It's not nice when people call you darling and that."© The Daily Telegraph, London..