PRINTDecades of music all dolled up
What happens when acoustics meet accoutrements?
LESLIE YINGLING
November 30, 2006 | 12:00 a.m. CST
For the past six decades, musicians have branded themselves with signature fashions that made them style icons. “People in the public eye are already influential, but musicians have an interest in attracting attention by individual and innovative appearance that in turn attracts attention to their music, their lifeblood,” says Laurel Wilson, MU textile and apparel management professor. It might be a PR ploy, but one thing is certain: Music plus fashion has always equaled cool.
1940s: Billie Holiday’s gardenia
Everyone loves lip-syncing while checking out their sexy selves in the bedroom mirror. Vox brings you a sampling of tunes in which music and fashion collide — for better or for worse.
1. “Cheap Sunglasses”
— ZZ Top
2. “Blue Suede Shoes”
— Elvis Presley
3. “Short Skirt/Long Jacket”
— Cake
4. “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’”
— Nancy Sinatra
5. “Boots of Spanish Leather”
— Bob Dylan
6. “Song for the Dumped (Black T-Shirt)”
— Ben Folds
7. “String of Pearls”
— Glenn Miller Orchestra
8. “Devil With the Blue Dress On”
— Mitch Ryder & The Detroits
9. ”Short Shorts”
— Royal Teens
10. “Raspberry Beret”
— Prince
Legend has it that Billie Holiday, dubbed Lady Day by jazz musician Lester Young, began wearing white gardenias in her hair to mask a scalp burn she sustained from ironing her hair before a show. Michael Budds, an MU music professor, believes the tale. “During the Swing Era in jazz history, each band tried to have a sound, a signature song and a look. Billie Holiday was certainly part of that culture. She tried to live up to her nickname with the gardenia and white gloves.”
The flowers inspired Lulu Beauty’s Starlet perfume, and since 1990, Baltimore has held the Billie Holiday Vocal Competition, where each winner receives a gardenia.
1950s: Buddy Holly’s glasses
Buddy Holly’s early rock catalog left an indelible mark on American pop culture, and so did his thick-rimmed black frames.
A 2005 interview of ’50s music researcher and Holly historian Bill Griggs posted on dailytoreador.com states, “I can tell you Buddy had 20/800 eyesight. There’s no way he could have played without those glasses.” His last pair of glasses, discovered 21 years after his death by an Iowa sheriff searching through courthouse records, is displayed at the Lubbock, Texas, Buddy Holly Center.
In 1994, Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” memorialized the rock pioneer with the lyrics, “I look just like Buddy Holly,” which were a blatant reference to the specs.
1960s: The Beatles’ Nehru jackets
In the late ’60s, the Beatles got in touch with their spiritual side by visiting the Maharashi Mahesh Yogi in India. During their trip, the Fab Four donned Nehru jackets, which quickly became popular across the globe. The jackets, named after India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, were single breasted, slightly fitted and had collar bands.
Although the Beatles made the jackets famous, Sammy Davis Jr. was a well-known Nehru connoisseur who claimed to own more than 200 of the jackets.
In the 1970s, Johnny Carson tried to bring the trend back, but it never reached its Beatles popularity again. Recently, Dr. Evil donned the jacket for the Austin Powers movies.
1970s: AC/DC’s Angus Young’s schoolboy uniform
Angus Young, lead guitarist for hard rockers AC/DC, is known for wearing a schoolboy uniform with shorts. One myth says he didn’t have time to change between school and band practice, but wikipedia.org claims the rocker, who was 18 when the band formed in ’73, had already ditched school for guitar. Other sources corraborate the entry and add that Young took a magazine job at age 15.
Another story has Young’s sister suggesting the pubescent uniform as a gimmick. Some sources insist the band told the press Young was born in 1959, four years after his actual birthday on March 31, 1955. The tactic was an apparent stab at making the schoolboy uniform rumor more believable.
In 1998, Britney Spears sexified the school uniform look in her “...Baby, One More Time” video.
1980s: A Flock of Seagull’s Mike Score — and his notorious hair
In 1982, the MTV generation got a taste of the infamous Flock of Seagulls haircut via the music video, “I Ran.” In a 1999 interview conducted by admirer Michelle Russo and posted on a fan-club Web site, Mike Score revealed the origin of his wacky hairstyle. He says that one day he dried his hair and tried to spike it, only to have another band member crush it flat. “But the sides stayed up, and that lead (sic) to the hairstyle,” Score says. “And I went out on stage with it, the front was crushed and the sides were up and everyone loved it, so we developed it.”
The hairstyle has been copied (and looks like Rosie O’Donnell’s ’do circa 2002) and parodied numerous times on screen, notably in Friends and The Wedding Singer.
1990s: Madonna’s cone-shaped bra
No stranger to fashion statements, Madonna and her famous bra had a point — two to be precise.
“The cone-shaped bra came from the torpedo bra of the 1950s,” says Wilson. She explains that the name came from Uplift, a book co-authored by Gau and Farrell-Beck.”
The “Like A Virgin” singer first sported the infamous look, designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier, on her 1990 Blond Ambition Tour. Gaultier had been working on the design in the 1980s, but it took Madonna’s endorsement to catapult the style into fashion history.
