Trixie Madell Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Trixie Madell, nine, of Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, has been a David Bowie fan since she was three. Her parents, Dawn and Josh Madell, are rock enthusiasts—she’s a music supervisor, he co-owned the record store Other Music—if not particular Bowie devotees. For Trixie’s third birthday, Dawn made her a CD with Bowie’s 1967 song “The Laughing Gnome” on it. (“Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, I’m the laughing gnome and you can’t catch me.”) Trixie became obsessed. “I thought ‘The Laughing Gnome’ was his only song,” she said last Wednesday. It wasn’t. Dawn played her “Let’s Dance,” which didn’t quite take, and some seventies Bowie, which did. At four, Trixie dressed as Bowie for Halloween; at seven, she met D. A. Pennebaker at an outdoor screening of a favorite film, “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars”; that same year, she had a Bowie-themed birthday party, with “Aladdin Sane” face painting, a lightning-bolt cake, and a Bowie-shaped piñata filled with Mars bars and Starbursts, to evoke outer space. “We still have the head,” she said. Bowie fandom isn’t universal among seven-year-olds, Dawn said: at the face-painting station, “some of the kids were, like, ‘Why can’t I have a butterfly?’ ”

On Wednesday, Trixie and her mother went to a preview of “David Bowie Is,” at the Brooklyn Museum, a sprawling exhibition of Bowie art, music, film, costumes, stage props, handwritten lyrics, and other materials which originated at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013, travelled to ten cities, and concludes in New York, where Bowie spent the last decades of his life. Trixie, who has outgrown two Bowie costumes and is collaborating on a third (“We went to Spandex World,” Dawn said), had dressed up: silver Doc Martens; silver sequinned pants; Bowie T-shirt and jacket; Ziggy-style astral sphere on her forehead, in eyeliner and gold dust.

The museum provides headphones, so that visitors can hear Bowie singing and speaking, synched to what they’re looking at. At the entrance, “Life on Mars” plays, and “BOWIE” is spelled out in lights above Kansai Yamamoto’s Kabuki-inspired “Tokyo Pop” patent-leather jumpsuit (1973), whose enormous teardrop-shaped legs jut out to each side like a typewriter eraser. Trixie said, “I wanted that for my first costume, but it was way too hard to make.” For her birthday party, they had created a cardboard replica, into which guests could stick their head for photographs. She had worn a homemade version of a blue flame-covered catsuit, by Freddie Burretti, with asymmetrical legs.

Bowie’s early years are represented by a dioramalike display featuring an aerial view of his suburban bedroom, in Bromley, and recordings of Bowie talking about his youth: forcing himself to listen to Eric Dolphy records; forming an organization, at seventeen, called the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men.

Trixie made her way through the exhibition, admiring a photo of Earth that had helped inspire “Space Oddity” (“From the lunar orbit, not the moon landing”); the video for “Life on Mars” (“I’ve seen this a bajillion times”); a rigid, doll-like costume that Bowie wore on “Saturday Night Live” (“They had to carry him, because he couldn’t move”); a patterned zip-up number (“That’s ‘Oh, You Pretty Things’ ”); the crystal ball and sceptre from Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” (“Mommy!”); the keys to Bowie’s Berlin apartment (“They look old”); playfully altered stills from “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (“They changed the bathtub water to tiles”); a suit that she correctly identified as being from Mick Rock’s “Pin Ups” photos; Bowie’s diary entry about writing “Fame” with John Lennon; a Pierrot mannequin (“Isn’t that the ‘Ashes to Ashes’ costume?”). She was uninterested in the “Blue Jean” display—Bowie’s post-seventies œuvre is still of less appeal—and avoided the 1969 short “The Mask,” involving tights and white face paint. “She’s not fond of the mime phase,” Dawn said. At the display for “Blackstar,” Bowie’s final album, lauded by critics but not by Trixie, she politely pointed out an attractive pattern in the black stars.

A vitrine containing a suitcase-style circa-1974 EMS Synthi AKS analog synthesizer, however, given to Bowie by Brian Eno, elicited a cry of recognition. “There’s this animated video that tells about the making of—it begins with a ‘W,’ ” Trixie said. (“Warszawa,” on the 1977 album “Low.”) The video, an affectionate satire of brilliance and pretension, is by the Brothers McLeod. (It is not on display.) “It’s really funny,” Trixie said. She recited part of it: “Tony Visconti is, like, ‘Would you like me to put this through the Eventide Harmonizer? It fiddles with the fabric of time,’ and Bowie goes back to being Aladdin Sane.” Later, “he turns into a synthesizer.”

As they exited, Dawn kissed Trixie’s head.

“Why are you rubbing gold dust all over me?” Trixie said, squirming.

“Nine is a weird age,” Dawn said. ♦