Striped bodysuit for the Aladdin Sane tour, 1973. Design by Kansai Yamamoto. Credit:Masayoshi Sukita Back at the bleak end of the 1960s and the boring/unstable early 1970s, you could say Bowie was Frankenstein and Ziggy Stardust his gorgeous monster, a harbinger – though he couldn't possibly know his explosive potential at the time – of what was widely dubbed Glam Rock but was actually a long-term licence to "be whoever you want, wear whatever you bloody like". Within two years, Bowie had killed off Ziggy and moved on, evolving into the darker, Diamond Dogs pack leader. But Ziggy's legacy of free expression lingered like any legend that's been snuffed out too young. (Note, the Yamamoto leotard knitting pattern was widely published a whole year after Ziggy was gone.) It looped through the punk years, laced fashion's new romantic era, underpinned the eclectic glamour of 1980s clubwear. And, though social conventions and big business imperatives tightened their grip around fashion, dampening its spirits and choking off self-expression within a decade, the harvesting of Bowie's Ziggy for "new" ideas has never stopped. In recent years, magazines such as Vogue, Harpers, WWD (Tilda Swinton's cover as Bowie's elegant Thin White Duke, was a standout in August 2011) and legions of lesser glossies, have shot Bowie-esque covers and spreads that plug neatly into current fashion's obsession with "authenticity". Givenchy, Gucci, Dior, Lanvin, Celine, Balmain and Prada models have also pounded along Parisian runways in blatantly Bowie-esque modes. And designers aren't coy about their sources of inspiration either: "I was born with a David Bowie album in my hand," says Hedi Slimane, author of the "skinny band-boy" menswear aesthetic that's dominated a decade. He said that after Bowie looks pinged in a collection for Dior Homme. "He was Adam and Angie Bowie was Eve to me."

David Bowie in the ice-blue Freddie Burretti suit on stage in Los Angeles in October 1974. Credit:Getty Images Bowie was just as much a "harvester" of others' ideas too, intuitively working them into his own: "Our new stage act will be outrageous, but theatrical," he announced in a pre-Ziggy 1971 press interview. "It's going to be costumed and choreographed, quite different to anything anyone else has tried to do before." His carefully concocted "package" was ready for delivery on Top of the Pops, a television music show comparable to Australia's Countdown, in July 1972. Ziggy Stardust was a jawdropping cocktail, a mix of what Bowie later quipped was "part Nijinsky and Woolworths". His shock-orange mullet was copied from a girls' magazine, eye make-up learnt from mime artist Lindsay Kemp, the glasscutter girl/boy cheekbones were entirely his own, but his genitals bulged gently in a zipped-tight, two-piece girly blue and red paisley patterned suit and slick laced calf boots copied from Stanley Kubrick's band of violent, rapist droogs in A Clockwork Orange. Ice-blue suit, 1972. Designed by Freddie Burretti for the 'Life on Mars?' video. Credit:Victoria and Albert Museum Bowie said later he was never interested in fashion (a refuge, in this writer's experience, of those who wear fashion exceptionally well and are fishing for compliments, or who are terrified of being judged by it), but there is no denying Ziggy was a composite of creative bits he fished from the Zeitgeist and cobbled into a new, never-before-seen, original fashion being.

Behind him, ordinary girls in the 1970s fashion "uniforms" of plaid trousers, mini skirts and hotpants, jigged to the beat, in stark, conservative contrast to the alien, elegant, androgynous and inexplicable Ziggy and his Spiders from Mars as they belted out Starman. Red platform boots for the 1973 'Aladdin Sane' tour. Courtesy of The David Bowie Archive, Credit:Victoria and Albert Museum The rest is history. A revolution locked and loaded and across Britain, the jaws of a generation – awkward, narcissistic, fizzing with confusion, hormones and sexy secrets – dropped. "That Top of the Pops changed lives," said just about everyone old enough to recall when Ziggy unleashed their inner something; when he seemed to "get" the tangle of teen torments they were, staring, thrilled to the gills, though they didn't quite know why, at the telly. "Bowie was magic and he was supreme," wrote one fan, recorded in a compilation of quotes from the time. "He had the qualities of a type of ruler ... I really believed he was an alien ... I would look at him in his posters and try to understand the sexuality ... he's influenced people's dress, their manners, their behaviour ..." Quilted two-piece suit, 1972. Designed by Freddie Burretti for the Ziggy Stardust tour. Credit:Victoria and Albert Museum

Yes, Bowie did all that, but in a measured, knowing way, with considerable creative help, a fairly laissez-faire attitude to plagiarism, a healthy dose of narcissism, and that rare trick mentioned by Cole, for picking the next cultural shift. He had an uncanny ability, for example, to pick collaborators who were plugged as deeply into the Zeitgeist as he was. He famously twinned with Alexander McQueen, Hedi Slimane, Giorgio Armani, Thierry Mugler and Issey Miyake but, around the birth of Ziggy Stardust, his first wife, Angie (nee Barnett), was one of the most potent. The stripling-slim bisexual club sprite shared his wardrobe, including the lush floral satin man-gown by London designer Mr Fish that Bowie wore (encouraged by Mick Jagger's penchant for man-frocks and make-up) for an early cover of the Man Who Sold The World album. And, it was Angie, reportedly, who nudged Bowie to ever more radical sexploits, off-the-wall costumes and collaborative, creative friendships. Installation shot of David Bowie at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Credit:Victoria and Albert Museum, London Even before Ziggy, the Bowies' circle swelled to embrace many who later contributed to the Stardust "package". The young folk singer and designer Natasha Korniloff collaborated on some of his most outrageous costumes, including a memorable black string body suit with one-legged gold-lame over-pant and "bra" of two breast-cupping hands (an absolute corker, copied to this day). Korniloff became a highly respected costume designer in other arts fields, but not before she designed Bowie's glistening blue "Pierrot' costume for his iconic 1980 Ashes to Ashes video clip. The Bowies also enlisted their babysitter, reportedly, to stitch some of Ziggy's earliest costumes, and a hairdresser to copy the cut and colour of Ziggy's spiked orange mullet from a photograph that may, or may not, have been shot for Vogue magazine. (Bowie candidly refutes this one of many legends, insisting it wasn't Vogue, but the cover of a girls' magazine, possibly Honey: "In 1972 I duplicated not only the colour from this cover, but the cut as well. A complete lift." The distinction, apparently, is vitally important to Bowie aficionados.)

Original photography for the Earthling album cover, 1997. Credit:Frank W. Ockenfels The Bowies met one of Ziggy's most significant conspirators at a gay nightclub in the late 1960s. Freddie Burretti was a startlingly handsome trainee tailor, particularly tuned to the Bowie vibe that night, in white spandex spank-shorts. Later, Bowie described their relationship as being "like a kind of telepathy ... whatever I think of in my mind, he produces for real." Burretti stitched most of Bowie's early groundbreaking costumes, always with pernickety attention to finish, including the zipped droog set of Ziggy's breakthrough moment on Top of the Pops, and many of the vivid, immaculately tailored suits he wore off and on stage. It was Burretti, who copied the first designs by Japanese iconoclast Kansai Yamamoto for Bowie. "I couldn't afford the clothes," Bowie shrugged later. The asymmetric knitted bodysuit, designed by Kansai Yamamoto for the Aladdin Sane tour. Credit:Victoria and Albert Museum

Yamamoto was a law graduate-turned-kooky-fashion-genius; young, afro-haired (odd in Japan), and an outsider in his own country. He later recalled "storming out of Japan" in disgust at its conservative rejection of his art. In 1971, mightily miffed, he packed up his joyful, paint-box-brightly coloured collection of voluminous cloaks, androgynous bodysuits and marvellously odd-ball experiments with kimono silhouettes and kabuki and samurai graphics, and presented them in a clashing, drumming, show unlike any other fashion show ever in London. Rapture ensued. "It's a whole new concept of dressing ... this will have massive impact on the world of fashion." Harpers & Queen's excited report on Yamamoto's show ran prophetically, with a shot of one model sporting a spiky mane of orange hair. Bowie was watching. Later, Yamamoto's fiery fashion moment would be eclipsed by a trio of Japanese designers in Paris; Rei Kawakubo,Issey Miyake, and "the other", eventually more famous Yamamoto, Yohji. But, for the time being, Kansai Yamamoto was the thrilling, fearless, alien artist Bowie needed. "He has an unusual face," Yamamoto observed approvingly, "neither man nor woman [which] suited me – most of my clothes are for either sex." Bowie bought his first genuine Yamamoto on sale in an expensive London boutique: "Nobody wanted to buy it, let alone wear it," he said. "It was the impossibly silly 'bunny' costume." In fact, it was a red leather playsuit called "Woodland Creatures", a buttock-enhancing slip of a thing with a handpainted pattern of winged rabbits inspired, Yamamoto told The Age in all seriousness: "[Because] in Japan, we recognise a rabbit figure on the surface of the moon."

Several Yamamoto costumes, commissioned by Bowie for his Aladdin Sane tour of the US and Japan after Ziggy Stardust was commercially successful enough to accumulate his first pot of money, are now the most recognisable relics of his extraordinary era. A slippery mini kimono in white satin, for example, added many an elegant crotch-shot to his album of free and fearless androgyny. A cartoonish black sculpted PVC bodysuit with comically bulbous legs asserts something more artful, modern and timeless and has become a symbol of Bowie and Yamamoto's creative alliance. More than anything, Yamamoto (who, incidentally, chucked in fashion for a stellar career in international live events production) contributed to Bowie's "alien" persona that triggered a revolution. For more than a decade, "radical individualism" – fashion academics' fancy word for what Bowie/Ziggy unleashed – continued to pop like buckshot across the world, manifesting differently in every wardrobe. It was hip, then it was groovy, then it was trendy, then it was cool to express yourself with your personally curated fash-mash of make-up, hairdos, op shop finds, home-made fashion-art, even impeccable suits, loud shirts, exquisite man-gowns, or a one-legged knitted leotard if that's what you fancied. But, probably the coolest thing about radical individualism was that for a time, it went mainstream. Not a niche, not a tribe, or fringe trend. Almost everybody dabbled one way or another in the 1970s and into the 1980s, from the politician with his pink shirt, lairy tie and safari suit, to the androgynous club king in floor-sweeper mink, platform shoes and slinky sequinned man-skirt. "People could have double lives," says Robyn Healy, head of RMIT Fashion and Textiles. "They could dress in a quite bland way by day, then release this other side – themselves, in the club scene at night." Healy equates the self-expressive thrill of 1970s and 1980s fashions with the most extravagant fancy dress and masked balls of the 18th and 19th centuries. "Dressing up was liberating."

It was also a phenomenon that could define a city by its most responsive, exotic individuals, according to Robert Buckingham, co-founder in 1983, of Melbourne's Fashion Design Council for fledgling creatives. "Melbourne was particularly responsive to that alternative fashion, that more baroque approach to dressing." The city's natural "cross-pollination" of fashion, music, dance, film, theatre and design artists, Buckingham says, tripped a particularly explosive chapter in local fashion history. "You could create a character, something extraordinary with clothes and hair," he says. "You'd make it yourself, or access quite a lot of 1920s and '30s clothes in op shops. There was a lot of ballgowns and furs, as I recall." The Bowie Is exhibition traces Bowie's timeline and poses a few intriguing questions: Why Bowie? Why Ziggy? Why then? And with billions of dollars tied up in a trend-driven fashion industry, could it possibly happen again? Some academics say it already has; fashion is now so same-same, so boring, that more and more rebellious exotics are busting out with their own versions of self-expression, unfettered by trends. Will they last? Could they swell in numbers, take over the mainstream, stop fashion and its mass-production business model in its tracks? "Fashion is soooo over," has become the war cry of waves of radical individualists reacting against boredom and a certain bleakness that could be compared to the early 1970s. "Fashion had been very uniform in the 1960s," says Healy. "It'd been driven by designer hierarchy, so this idea that the individual could actually invest their own time, working out their hair colour, making their own stuff for their own style, making their own look, was really radical."

It still is. Shaun Cole, Robert Buckingham and Robyn Healy will speak at ACMI's Bowie Symposium on July 17.