Where did the name ZIGGY STARDUST come from?
ZIGGY came from the name of a London tailor’s shop (called “Ziggy’s”) that Bowie saw from a train one day. In an interview he said that it was his private joke that because Ziggy Stardust was going to be largely about clothes, he had named him Ziggy. It is also likely to be a derivative of Iggy (Iggy Pop) and possibly Twiggy (the British model) who appeared with him on the cover of PINUPS (1973). It was also, as Bowie later told Rolling Stone, “one of the few Christian names I could find beginning with the letter ‘Z’.” Another possible source of the Ziggy name comes from Bowie’s connection with Marc Bolan in the late 1960s. “Zinc Alloy” was the name that Bolan intended to use if his then current group “Marc Bolan & T.Rex” failed. But it never transpired. Later Bolan would parody the Ziggy album with his own called “Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow” (1974). So was Ziggy also a combination of “Zinc” + “Iggy”? STARDUST came from an eccentric American Country and Western singer
