Fashion Trends Started by the Rolling Stones
How the Rolling Stones Became Fashion Icons
On May 4, 1963, the Rolling Stones, then a scrappy quintet known mostly for banging out Chuck Berry covers, gathered for their first official photo shoot on the streets of London's Chelsea district.
Five bad boys in the making, some still sporting adolescent pimples, they slouched in ratty sweaters, rumpled jackets and sick-fitting trousers, looking like students stumbling through a iii-day bough later on getting expelled.
"Word got out that the results of the session were icky," Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones' manager, later said. And he could barely contain his glee. That just-got-out-of-bed, to-hell-with-you look, Mr. Oldham added (he used considerably saltier language) "would ascertain them and divine them."
Simply it would inappreciably limit them. Over the side by side five decades, the Stones would plow the stage into the world'due south largest track, transforming their look constantly and radically, even every bit they stayed true to their filthy, blues-based sound.
The band's vast mode legacy is on full display at a show opening Saturday in New York, "Exhibitionism — The Rolling Stones," billed as the largest drove of the Stones' stage outfits, musical instruments and memorabilia ever assembled. The show takes place at Industria, a sprawling studio and consequence space in the West Hamlet, after a five-month run at the Saatchi Gallery in London that drew more than 350,000 visitors.
The retrospective, curated by Ileen Gallagher, formerly of the Rock and Whorl Hall of Fame, digs deep from collectors' vaults and the band members' closets. The black-and-ruby Lucifer cape that Mr. Jagger wore at Altamont? Information technology'due south in that location. The antique toy pulsate kit that Charlie Watts used for "Street Fighting Human"? It's there, too.
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The techy, multimedia exhibition contains old diaries, notebooks filled with lyrics, original cover art and historically meaning guitars in glass cases. Video screens flicker with historical concert footage, and recorded sound of the band talking about songwriting wafts overhead.
The exhibition also features meticulous re-creations of a Stones recording studio and the infamous hovel at 102 Edith Grove in London that Mr. Jagger shared with Keith Richards and Brian Jones in 1962 and '63, complete with peeling wallpaper, discarded Playboy magazines and an artificial odor that suggests dried beer and onetime socks. ("I kept saying, 'C'mon guys, at that place are likewise many beer bottles, too many dishes in the sink," recalled Mick Jagger, in a telephone interview from Los Angeles last week.) Call up of "Exhibitionism" as the King Tut exhibition for the dad-jeans gear up.
But it is the floors filled with menstruation Stones outfits, many non seen in public for decades, that serve to underscore the band's incalculable influence on rock fashion.
Although David Bowie generally got credit for being rock'southward ultimate chameleon, the Stones went i further: They invented the very image of the modern rock star.
With a fashion sensibility that was ane part Vogue mag and i office peel magazine, the Stones laid the background for punk, dandified Mod, pushed psychedelia to its cartoon farthermost and basically invented glam rock. And that was just the '60s.
"You want to be new, you want to be eye-catching and nevertheless elegant, just yet crazy, because you're onstage," said Mr. Jagger, explaining his sartorial philosophy in the interview. "It's not just five blokes in bluejeans going on with a lot of amps, you know what I mean?"
The collection starts at the beginning, with Mr. Jones'south houndstooth-bank check jacket from 1963, a relic of that blink-and-you lot'll-miss-it moment where the Stones attempted to be G-rated teen idols in matching uniforms, à la Herman's Hermits.
"In the early '60s, one of the big fashion things was the Beatles' jackets," Mr. Jagger said. "That was something dissimilar. Clothes were immediately talked most on men, every bit well as on women performers."
Even then, he added, the band was always mystified why their manager, who curated its bad-boy epitome as the anti-Beatles, wanted to experiment with uniforms. "It was a really weird thing, the matching jackets," Mr. Jagger said, considering Mr. Oldham's "whole thing was to be not like that. He was the one who wanted to be different."
And very quickly, they were. By the time the Stones were starting to cross over in America in 1964 and 1965, they already looked vaguely dangerous, at to the lowest degree to teen-pop audiences weaned on Neil Sedaka.
"Y'all saw the scruffiness, the down-dressing that really didn't exist in the American vocabulary: the mismatched look, the leather jackets, adopting some of the traditional rhythm-and-blues style," said the designer Anna Sui, a lifelong Stones fan. "And then, throwing in a pair of white shoes. It was but like, 'Wow, what is this?' That's how guys reacted. And to this day, yous meet guys dressing exactly that way."
Before long, the Stones were serving as global ambassadors of a very different mode, the Swinging London dandy look coming out of Carnaby Street and Male monarch's Road. That is exemplified in the exhibition by Mr. Watts'south blue-and-green tartan suit by Granny Takes a Trip, the seminal Rex's Route boutique of the era, and Mr. Jagger'southward red Grenadier war machine guardsman drummer's jacket, which he wore while performing "Paint Information technology Black" on the TV show "Ready Steady Go!" on May 27, 1966.
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Victorian cravats and Regency-era ruffled shirts were the order of the day. "It was actually the 'anything goes' period," Mr. Jagger said. "At that place was a lot of antique clothing being sold, and a lot of information technology was revived Romantic stuff in velvets and things like that."
The style cues did not only come from the streets, but likewise from the mode establishment. "I was seeing fashion a lot. I was great friends with David Bailey," Mr. Jagger said, referring to the manner photographer, "so I'd exist hanging out with people from like Faddy and that sort of thing."
While some outfits in the exhibition still expect cover-worthy (Mr. Jagger's Beau Brummel-esque black velvet frock glaze from 1965 comes to heed), the Stones were not simply recycling swinging London in the prepackaged manner of the manner glossies.
"I loved the fact that they looked similar Romantic poets with lace trim sleeves and brooches and brocaded jackets," Ms. Sui said. "Everything was askew, and it became another way of looking really cool."
That mid-'60s dandy await may accept borrowed from the gender-blurring Oscar Wilde mode vernacular. Only it was scarcely a hint of what was to come.
On July five, 1969, during a memorial concert in London's Hyde Park for Brian Jones (the band's founder who drowned shortly after existence fired from the band), Mr. Jagger strode onstage in white voile Michael Fish human-dress with ruffled bishop's sleeves and a bow-laced forepart. A re-creation of the apparel is on display in "Exhibitionism."
The Stones had essentially created "glam rock," said Simon Reynolds, the writer of "Shock and Awe," a new book on that '70s music movement. "Bowie is oftentimes regarded as the pioneer when it comes to gender-bending and extreme fashion statements in rock," Mr. Reynolds said. "But many of the things he's been historic for had really already been done by the Rolling Stones."
Keith Richards, for instance, was rifling through his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg'southward closet for his groundbreaking ensembles. "It actually pissed off Charlie Watts, with his walk-in cupboards of impeccable Savile Row suits, that I started to go a fashion icon for wearing my old lady's apparel," Mr. Richards wrote in his 2010 autobiography, "Life."
By the landmark 1972 tour, it was simply expected that Mr. Jagger would accept the stage in eye-shadow and skintight velvet jumpsuits by Ossie Clark, three of which are on display.
"These kinds of jumpsuits, they were really piece of cake, yous didn't have to brand any decisions," Mr. Jagger said. "Yous were just like, 'Is it going to be this colour or this color,' then put a scarf over it and yous're ready. They were very comfortable to clothing. They were, similar, sexy, and you could movement in them."
For his part, Mr. Jagger thinks the androgyny thing was overblown. "I hateful, practise you lot think the jumpsuits are androgynous?" he said. "I suppose the colors are. I mean, I never saw any women wearing them."
"The innocence of information technology was, you lot weren't really consciously thinking about the androgynous part of it," he said. "You were hoping other people would discover it, or journalists would write almost it, and you'd become, 'Beginning I'm going to look up what 'androgynous' actually means, and then I'one thousand going to analyze it.'"
If the band had burned out at that point, like so many of their contemporaries, the clothes in "Exhibitionism" would even so make for a watershed retrospective. The Stones of the '60s and '70s had an impact on men's mode that is costive.
"I've lost count of how many mood boards I've seen with photos of Mick and Keith, and Brian Jones and Charlie Watts, besides," said Will Welch, the editor in chief of GQ Style. "Fashion designer inspiration boards, collages on the walls at cool men's stores, corporate-branding PowerPoint presentations, the pages of men'south magazines including GQ and GQ Way: The listing goes on."
"But that hasn't watered down the power of the band or their legacy a chip," he said. "What blows me away is that there e'er seem to exist more than photos we haven't seen. It's like, how many lives did these guys live?"
The Rolling Stones, in fact, had some other twoscore years of caput-turning looks.
As disco became a punch line in the late '70s, the Stones seemed to salvage a degree of cultural brownie for information technology by reaching for the white suits and skinny ties and cranking out slick dance-popular numbers like "Miss You."
In the early '80s, the Day-Glo explosion of MTV videos seemed similar child'south stuff except when Mr. Jagger would testify upward onstage in tangerine-orange, blue and gold athletic pants by Antony Toll (also in the exhibition), turning a l,000-seat football stadium into his personal Jazzercise class.
Past the '90s, the Stones were a Fortune 500-level touring behemoth, and their wearing apparel reflected their status equally the new establishment.
Mr. Richards turned his status every bit rock's ur-insubordinate into a make, performing in a swashbuckling assemblage of fauna-print coats, headbands and sash belts that synergized with his part every bit Captain Teague in Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean area" movies.
Mr. Jagger, meanwhile, went couture, working with the leading way designers, including Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen and Hedi Slimane, for phase outfits that would pop even for fans squinting from the bleachers.
"I merely think they were the people who were going to do the best job," Mr. Jagger said. "It's just a natural progression to piece of work with the all-time fashion designers bachelor."
Equally "Exhibitionism" proves, corporate need not equal bland. Take, for example, a spectacular genu-length sequined coat by Alexander McQueen, superimposed with haunting images of the children of Czar Nicholas II, that the singer wore during the "Bridges to Babylon" bout of the tardily '90s.
Later on 54 years and seemingly 54,000 fashion experiments, the only remaining question seems to be whether Mr. Jagger regretted any particular outfit. "Ah, that'due south a horrible question!" he said with a laugh. "You lot're bound to make mistakes."
"At that place are so many ghastly awful ones," he added, "but at the time, everyone loved them, you know what I mean?"
"You always have to go farther and go to more to the defense of the ridiculous in fashion," he said. "Y'all have to get and take chances, and people are going to express joy, and possibly it's not going to be a success.
"But there is no success without risk."
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