Arts

It is not everyone who can carry off one of my favorite Prince outfits. Pictured in 1988, Prince stands resplendently Prince-like in polka dots: black on white in the trouser, rising via a sylph-like waist to black on white for the shirt and tie. It is butch and femme; assertive and demure; a tease and as tough as nails. It is, in all its gender and fashion-blurring brilliance, Prince.

Only Prince could wear a police cap with face-obscuring chains, or opaque gold sunglasses (2012), and make it look like practical daywear.
Prince was a peacock. Prince very visibly loved fashion, and he wore it with such ferocity and passion that he demanded we didn’t laugh at his outlandishness—we went along with it, and applauded each new act of sartorial maximalism he executed. He had fun with fashion. And he knew that whatever else, rock stars had to look the part. He would have blanched at jeans and a T-shirt. Where was the glitter and drama in that?

In an era of sexual declaration and easy visual messaging, Prince remained a supremely, gorgeously dressed mystery. He was apparently straight (who knows for sure, maybe this will be clarified post-death–but the fascination was healthy for him and us), and also proud to look anything but straight. Look at him in his “Purple Rain” era—ruffles and high neck shirt and purple and hair teased high. Liberace would have whimpered in fashion defeat faced with Prince bestriding his motorcycle in 1984, and Alexis Colby would have burnt her shoulder pads.

Prince was not a teasing sartorial gender-blender like Bowie, but something tougher and grittier—he could, as a colleague just said, be on stage dressed in conventional terms as a woman while singing about having very enthusiastic sex with women.

The Prince wardrobe through the years—as seen in 2013 in Billboard—spans everything from bondage-styled lingerie to sleek white suits, with every color of the rainbow—purple obviously a favorite (supposedly because it was the color of royalty)—and pink feather in between.

He could strut in a diamante-encrusted suit, he could wear a flowing white shirt and trousers. He could wear yellow trousers, carry a guitar in many colors, and wear gold sunglasses. He once said, quoted later in Vice, “People say I’m wearing heels because I’m short. I wear heels because the women like ’em.”

He was selling sex, lasciviously—and blurring as many boundaries around masculinity and femininity as possible. He was so finely featured his flirtations with facial hair would make him look like a gorgeous drag king.

On the cover of his 1980 album Dirty Mind, he stands in a butch jacket and pair of tight black briefs. For Controversy, the knickers came on their own, and were pulled high and tight. For Lovesexy, he was naked in a giant lily, a hand delicately placed over his chest, staring yearningly off camera like a young Elizabeth Taylor.

In the 1980s came the high-collared, ruffled shirts, cutoff gloves, and a shiny, white lace two-piece suit. There were crop tops, sometimes frilly and ruffled, showcasing taut abs, and spray-on pants. He wasn’t a stranger to suits, but Prince’s were not from Men’s Warehouse—they could be in white or vivid stripes. At the VMAs in 1991, a gold mesh bodysuit with laser cutouts came with the ass panel cut out, revealing two gorgeous cheeks.

When Prince changed his name to a symbol, that symbol turned up on shirts, and the jewelry he draped his outfits with. Later on, just when you thought he might have calmed down a bit—that age had finally, unthinkably caught up with Prince (flatter hair, conventional looking long coat)—he would pull together a ruffled red trouser suit sprayed gold. Even when convention was his go-to he would pep up an immaculately fitted suit with a red fedora, red shirt, and red pocket handkerchief, as he did at the 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.

That same year a goatee turned up, worn with flowing outfit, but he was also clean-shaven in a tight suit. At the Oscars in 2005, he wore a sharp purple jacket, and wide white pants. At the Super Bowl in 2007, he strutted in aqua and orange.

He wore white at Coachella in 2008, and to collect a BET Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.

In recent years, the trousers got wider and he acquired a taste for modestly cut tunics (though, never to stint on color, these still came in gold), just as the hair returned to its Afro hugest, and his body seemingly thinner.

But still that coy smile, that shyness, that guard against the world remained. Prince’s fashion outrageousness was set square against his public reticence and successfully achieved desire for privacy.

The genderfuck Prince executed in what he wore made him look so open, the craziness ostensibly telling us so much. But he was playing with us, as much as he was having the time of his life strutting about in a lot and in nothing at all. Prince’s wardrobe, in the loudest, most excessive way, was a masterful game of peekaboo—and his best camouflage.