Remake, Remodel: Music’s Ten Greatest Menswear Imagemakers

Art-pop provocateur David Byrne has sported many memorable costumes during his long, distinguished career — a flayed-skinless all-over muscle suit for a televised live session of Psycho Killer, a leafy blazer/trunk trouser ensemble for an iconic shot by Annie Leibovitz, to name just two. But it’s the ‘big suit’ he donned during the show that’d be immortalised in 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense he’ll forever be associated with. Starting the gig in a suit of normal proportions (well, by eighties standards, at least), Byrne emerges around the one-hour mark in a spectacularly outsized sartorial creation inspired by Japanese Noh theatrical costume. “A friend made a kind of quip, while I was trying to think of what to do on this next tour, what to wear, and he said, ‘Well, you know what theatre is — everything has to be bigger,’” Byrne said in an interview. “He didn’t mean the clothes had to be bigger, he meant that the gestures were larger, the music had to be more exaggerated on stage than they would in real life. But I took it very literally and thought, ‘Oh, the clothes are bigger.’” It was a simple matter of playing with proportions, said Byrne. “I wanted my head to appear smaller and the easiest way to do that was to make my body bigger — because music is very physical and often the body understands it before the head.”

At 69 years of age, even on stage, Elton John dresses relatively soberly these days. But in the 1970s and ’80s, when he was anything but sober, Elton’s dress sense was as outrageous as his cocaine habit. Hoovering vast quantities of disco dust and guzzling booze to overcome his painful shyness — “When you take a drug and you take a drink and you mix those two together, you think you're invincible,” he said — the Rocket Man’s toot-fuelled sartorial choices included a menagerie of animal costumes, wing-shouldered satin jumpsuits, gold lamé hotpants, a bedazzled baseball kit, glam Uncle Sam, musketeer and military dictator combos, sequins up the wazoo, a plethora of platform shoes, plus of course, countless flamboyant spectacles. John reckons he owns 250,000 glasses — this despite having auctioned off most of his memorabilia, costumes and eyewear at Sotheby’s in 1988, and regularly clearing out his closet in the years since with auctions to benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation (which, through efforts such as these, has raised more than $350 million over the past 25 years).

What happens when you take a loose collective of some of the finest musicians on the planet, fill their heads with psychotropic substances and science fiction references, and let them indulge their every creative whim in the midst of the glittering disco era? P-Funk happens, that’s what. Descending from the mythical ‘Mothership’, these self-described “afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies” (in the words of bandleader George Clinton) crafted one of the most distinctive stage personas of the 1970s, a perfectly astro-psychedelic complement to the spacy, smoked-out sounds they’d create — which would enjoy a massive resurgence when sampled by Dr. Dre and his fellow G-Funk purveyors of the 1990s.

Though today most hiphop/streetwear collaborations are forced, artificial, commercially-driven affairs, the partnership between Queens rap pioneers Run DMC and adidas came about entirely organically. The group loved an outmoded basketball sneaker named the Superstar and three-stripe tracksuits so much that they devoted a track on their breakout album Raising Hell to the brand, essentially providing adidas with millions of dollars in free advertising. Savvy Def Jam Records boss Lyor Cohen saw potential to monetise the shout-out, inviting an exec from the German athleticwear giant to witness the riotous scene at a New York Run DMC concert when the band performed “My Adidas” — and subsequently sealed an unprecedented seven-figure deal that saw the endorsement formalised, with a range of collaborative garments and shoes created. A classic hiphop look was laid down — and a lucrative partnership for all parties concerned was born.

As examined in great detail in our feature on David Bowie’s various stylistic incarnations, published following his death earlier this year, there are few recording artists for whom music and image are so inextricably linked. From his hippy-dippy flower-power emergence in the late ’60s, through the astro-glam of Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust’s extraterrestrial chic, the way-out Kansei Yamamoto designs for Aladdin Sane, the cocaine tailoring of the Pin-Ups/Diamond Dogs/Young Americans seventies ‘Thin White Duke’ days, and his jazzy sartorialism in the 1980s, the new image Bowie would reveal was always just as eagerly anticipated as the tunes it’d complement.

In the glam-rock dawning days of Roxy Music, the band’s look was all skin-tight leather, plaform footwear, leopard print and lamé, strutting peacockery (literally, in the case of feather-fancying Brain Eno). Rolling Stone described frontman Bryan Ferry’s early-’70s aesthetic as “1950s-greaser-cum-suave-matinee-idol”. However, as the edges were smoothed and the band’s sound grew increasingly sophisticated and lush, so too would Ferry’s style, the rockabilly flavour fading away in favour of a decidedly ‘Old Hollywood’ demeanour. A coal miner’s son who’s transformed himself into the very model of a modern English gentleman, Ferry is one of The Rake’s all-time favourite stylists — whether reinterpreting Dylan, or reinventing our concept of the manor-born laird. Remake, remodel indeed.

A star from childhood, flamboyant ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson had the chance to squeeze myriad remarkable looks into his all-too-short lifespan. Thriller’s zippy red number, Billie Jean’s shiny, shrunken suit, the tux with white socks from Off The Wall — the list goes on. One particularly outstanding (and decidedly rakish) piece, however, was the ceremonial-influenced ensemble MJ bespoke at Gieves & Hawkes in 1988, which the tailors now keep in their archive. “A member of Mr Jackson’s team called and enquired about a uniform that was on display in the windows of our flagship store at No. 1 Savile Row,” recalled Gieves’s head of military, Garry Carr. “Mr Jackson saw the uniform on display when he was driving through Savile Row and the jacket captured his attention. Since he was in a hurry, we went directly to his hotel for a fitting. We did not know at this point that it was going to be featured in his world tour! He was very specific in that he wanted the uniform he had seen in the window. Unfortunately since it was an official Privy Councillor diplomatic uniform, we had to make adjustments so that it would be able to be worn by a civilian,” Carr said. “The epaulets and decorations [by Hand & Lock] were added so as to make it more unique… The actual fitting did not take too long as he was a very busy man. The actual production time of the garment was also less than normal. It usually takes three to four months to produce a piece of bespoke military wear, but we were only allowed a matter of weeks as he was in a hurry to continue his tour.” Carr remarked, “Back then, we weren’t making clothes for many pop stars, so everybody got quite excited. We were very proud to be part of music history. We didn’t hear from Mr Jackson again, sadly — although we do offer a wonderful after service.”

In 1998, the first time this writer saw Daft Punk perform — actually, just one half, Thomas Bangalter; his flying-phobic partner Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo had begged off jetting to Australia at the last minute — the ‘live act’ was as lo-fi as the costuming: a nondescript French fella spinning vinyl in a cheap rubber mask (a dog face, if foggy memory serves) and standard civilian attire. The duo that’d soon become the biggest act in electronic music only adopted their trademark robot guises the following year, issuing this statement: “We did not choose to become robots. There was an accident in our studio. We were working on our sampler, and at exactly 9:09 a.m. on September 9, 1999, it exploded. When we regained consciousness, we discovered that we had become robots.” Today renowned for their high-tech helmets (the first iterations of which were reportedly built at a cost of $65,000) and slick Hedi Slimane-designed garb, Bangalter and de Homem-Christo have created one of music’s most iconic images — ironically, by remaining doggedly ‘faceless’. “It’s a statement, saying we’re not part of this whole circus… the supremacy of the star system, the manipulation of art, people just wanting to be picked by the (reality) television system and be made into stars,” Bangalter told me during a rare interview in 2003.

Like David Bowie, we’ve written extensively of the late, great Prince Rogers Nelson, whose eccentric stylistic choices confounded categorisation — just like his music. Indeed, Prince approached his style of dress much as he did his songwriting, constantly endeavouring to move forward and innovate: “I try not to repeat myself. It’s the hardest thing in the world to do — there are only so many notes one human being can master,” he said. Expressing himself musically or stylistically, Prince ignored the critics. “I don’t really care so much what people say about me because it usually is a reflection of who they are,” he said. “All these non-singing, non-dancing, wish-I-had-me-some-clothes fools who tell me my albums suck. Why should I pay any attention to them?”

Having previously worn a gorilla suit, Zorro and Superman costumes on stage, legendary rock guitarist Angus Young first adopted his signature school uniform get-up in 1974, at the suggestion of his sister, Margaret, and older brother, AC/DC co-founder Malcolm. At the time, the entire band wore costumes — for the Sydney show where Angus debuted the schoolboy look, his bandmates were dressed as a harlequin, a satin-clad glam airman, and an NYPD cop — but his hard-rocking cohort would soon settle into standard denim’n’tees attire, leaving Angus to forge ahead as the perpetual prep-school Peter Pan of the six-string for the next four decades. “You could say I’ve maintained a distinctively classic look,” he once remarked. “Have you seen what some of the younger [artists] are wearing nowadays? They look like they’ve stolen their mothers’ skirts!”