Sly Stone taught pop stars how to dress wild

Washington Post

a day ago

In 1968, the Temptations were still performing in matching suits and the Beatles had just shed their pin-neat tailoring for the whimsical trappings of Carnaby Street.
That same year, Sly Stone and his newly formed band, multiracial and mixed gender, posed in outfits as wild as those groups' seemed scripted: hippies and dandies and bohemians in peacock prints, optimistically borrowing garments and accessories from the Middle East and South Asia.
Even amid this style splendor, Stone stood out: In the middle, he was stoic as a toreador prefight, his chest bare beneath an embroidered vest and a pile of chains. On his legs was a pair of breeches over knee-high socks and gladiator sandals. In one look, he combined ancient Roman battle gear, the snobbery of equestrianism, a then-trendy fervor for Indian styles and a prescient taste for hip-hop's gold chain obsession — a seemingly nonsensical mix that altogether, with Stone's prodigious touch, just worked.
Stone dressed the way he made music. He grabbed at influences but understood them intuitively, never superficially, which allowed him to create songs — and outfits — that were so original that they made you feel good before you even understood what was happening to you. Jimi Hendrix shared and almost certainly influenced Stone's flamboyance, wearing large hats and decorating his bare chest with a long scarf and jewels. But if Hendrix was soft and romantic, with his tie-dyes and bell-bottom jeans, Stone was more mercurial, integrating glam, Edwardian melodrama and African diasporic styles into his foundation of funk. He wore his big sunglasses not, as Greta Garbo did, to shield, but to invite your gaze.
Stone wanted your ears and your eyes. For a 1969 television performance, he dressed in a satin ocher blouse with a Draculoid collar, tying up the front to expose his chest and fabulous abs, seducing the audience at the piano with 'Hot Fun in the Summertime.' A few minutes later, he stood up for 'I Want to Take You Higher,' revealing that the shirt's bishop sleeves were festooned with lengthy black fringe that shimmied as he punched his arms through the air like a preacher sermonizing.
We may not have seen that live fusion between clothing and music — not a marriage of music and aesthetic, as David Bowie pioneered, but a synergy between a song's message and a shirt's purpose — again until Beyoncé stepped onstage during her Renaissance tour in 2023, razzing her audience with mirrored alien wear as she wiggled between those robot arms.
Before Stone, you could either assuage your audience with clothes — as many of Motown's acts did, as Black artists who sought to appeal to White audiences — or scare them, as Hendrix did with his ripped jeans, or Janis Joplin with her unkempt hair.
Stone sketched out a third possibility: Your clothes could open up your music. His band was not focused on looking 'cohesive' visually; rather, its members' disparate and sometimes clashing ensembles emphasized their universe of inspirations. His own ensembles had the same smooth tension.
The hippie style that Stone took to an intergalactic other place was about rebellion: that you could reject the values of your parents, of the clean-cut establishment, by wearing your jeans frayed, by not buying new things but patching or mending what was old, by wearing clothes from another time to show you longed for a simpler (if imagined) past.
Stone's style was about freedom — the freedom to mix pieces from different centuries and cultures that seem to have little in common and to make them work, even sizzle. He could put on a rastacap and a black fringe suede suit and it just made sense. When he walked onstage in the mid-1970s, wearing a purple sequin jacket with orange flames and a silver sequin baker boy cap and little silver pants — well, that was wilder than anything the Sex Pistols or the New York Dolls were wearing at that time. Ripped jeans and safety-pinned T-shirts are nice poetry, but they don't require the courage that Stone's clothes did. A male rock star in women's clothes is often a gimmick. A male rock star in clothes that seem to defy the orders of mens- and womenswear but are undeniably sexy? That's bold.
The door Stone karate-kicked open would shape the looks of some of the biggest pop stars of the late 20th century and early 21st. There was Prince and his feminized, feline sex appeal, then Rick James in his total commitment to exuberance. Then Beyoncé, of course, who, like Stone, is less interested in flouting her connections to designers or trends and instead committed to wearing clothes than enhance the experience of seeing her onstage. Perhaps the musicians most influenced by Stone are Andre 3000 and Big Boi, formerly of Outkast, who started off weird — Andre wore a lace-up skirt and T-shirt, and Big Boi a snakeskin short suit, to the Source Awards in 1999 — and then just kept getting freakier even as they became household names.
As he moved beyond his musical prime in the 1960s and '70s and struggled with addiction, he remained glamorous. He wore furs and metallic jeans, Dior sunglasses and a big belt spelling out 'SLY' in silver studs. In 2010, he played Coachella, dressed in a police officer's uniform and a blond wig. It was weird, but it was like nothing else.
Unlike Hendrix or Gram Parsons, who worked with Michael & Toni and Nudie Cohn, respectively, to create their custom pieces, Stone was never associated with a particular designer or store. Nor did he think about clothes the way Bowie or Madonna did — as tools to help create an era or mood that would mark a new stylistic experimentation. For Stone, dressing was something deeper than a designer or an exercise. He didn't just play with style. He lived it.