Everyone has a personal Elvis. He is there for all of us, housed in the collective unconscious, one of the few people who can rightly be called an icon, although it is not always certain what.
There’s musical Elvis and race-calculated Elvis and sex symbol Elvis and Las Vegas Elvis and Mississippi Elvis and rockabilly Elvis and Hollywood Elvis and Warhol Elvis and Imperial Elvis and impersonator Elvis. There’s also a warning Elvis: The bloated, pill-addicted burnout has passed away at the age of 42.
There’s especially Elvis, the legend, a man whose humble origins and meteoric rise have been rehearsed so often that the details hardly seem to describe a human being breathing the same air as the rest of us. Reviving that figure isn’t an easy task, and so the Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s dreamily overwrought historical biopic “Elvis” will inevitably fall short for many. How could it not? Capturing Elvis is like describing a quasar – a distant and intensely luminous object from an early universe.
It has been four and a half decades since the death of Mr. Presley, nearly 87 years since he was born in a modest house in Tupelo, madam. Yet somehow he remains as powerful a figure as ever. He is instantly recognizable and at the same time obscure, a symbol of the working-class South from which he sprang; a pop world he transformed; a culture of erasure that leaves in doubt even now how much Elvis was his own creation and how much borrowed from the black culture that is still America’s barely recognized mother vein.
There is, more simply, Elvis, a creature of style and fashion – and that Elvis should be the easiest to pin down. But even here Elvis remains seductively elusive, the person in the clothes clinging stubbornly to his mystery. While we can’t know for sure how Elvis came up with and developed his indelible image, at least we can trace what he was wearing.
In the beginning, there were surprisingly conservative stage costumes and jackets that were fuller than was the custom in the 1950s, though less for style reasons than to accommodate Elvis’s outrageous twists the pelvis.
As his fame grew and club dates became arenas, visibility demanded more flamboyance from him. One of the results was a nearly radioactive gold lamé suit that his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, ordered for rodeo tailor Nudie Cohn, which appeared on the cover of the album ‘50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong’. 1959.
Anyone who has ever visited Graceland knows that Elvis’s homely taste – Jungle Room aside – leaned more towards bourgeois gentility than his public image would suggest. Admittedly, he owned many flashy cars (some say more than 260 in his short life), a private jet, and had a penchant for diamond-encrusted gumball rings and pendants (most famous for his Taking Care of Business logo, TCB).
But the performances we most often associate with him, which have influenced artists not equal to Tupac Shakur, Bruno Mars and Brandon Flowers and who, if that’s the word, continue to inspire designers at labels like Versace, Cavalli, Costume National and Gucci, were a far cry from the robes Elvis lazed in at home.
If that lame suit, more than any other piece of clothing, made a case for Elvis as a sartorial rebel, pushing the boundaries of convention in a Brooks Brothers era, when the lines between the sexes were clearly drawn, it was undoubtedly his pompadour who made him a gender radical. American men in the monochrome Brooks Brothers 50s did not wear shiny gold suits. They certainly didn’t dye their hair.
But under the apparent influence of black musicians like Little Richard, whose teased bouffante locks still look radically, daringly odd even today, Elvis not only colored his locks, but trained them into flowing volutes which he then waxed. and pomade to immobile lacquered.
Without the pompadour, no Elvis costume can be considered complete. Impersonators would never consider going without Elvis’ patent leather haircut. Austin Butler’s hair in Mr. Luhrmann is as black as Elvis’s. What one has in common with the other is hair that is slightly blond in its natural state.
In civilian life, and as his income grew, Elvis became an early adopter of fashion. Like many hipsters and countless musicians of the late 1950s, he favored Cuban collar, wide-leg shirts, pleated trousers, loafers and blouson jackets – a style that menswear labels like Prada regularly revisit.
Unlike millions of other Americans then and now, Elvis rarely wore jeans outside of the movies he starred in when Hollywood discovered the handsome working-class Southern hero and put him to work making 31 films in 13 years. Elvis didn’t like denim, it was said, because it was too sharp a reminder of his humble origins.
Since Elvis was in a sense less of an innovator than a magnifying glass, it seems like a relief to attribute to him, as many do, the original trends for floral-print aloha shirts (which were popular after the release of his movie “Blue Hawaii” from 1961″) or tight cowhide suits, like the black leather one he wore for a 1968 television special, or a rockabilly style that was already well-established among fans of the rural subculture by the time he rose to fame.
But for anyone following the lineage of menswear styles, whether it be western popper shirts, wink shoes, argyle socks, penny loafers or quiffs, Elvis is inevitable in the family tree.
Is it perverse to find splendor in the most parodied element of Elvis’ style evolution? That is, are famous jumpsuits, the standard costume of impersonators and trick-or-treaters on Halloween. Usually treated as sartorial jokes, these jumpsuits symbolize the star at his peak, the moment before his fame and life collapsed on him and he collapsed. Those glittering garments with their embroideries and nailhead patterns or glued-on barnacles were the precursors to the stage wear worn by every pop star – Prince, David Bowie, Harry Styles – who once invited his fans to watch him erotically.
Oddly enough, the one-piece unisex garments were essentially a practical solution devised by Elvis’ costume designer Bill Belew to allow him to move freely on stage while maintaining his silhouette. The stand-up collars, like the lace collar of a Spanish infanta in a Velázquez portrait, not only framed Elvis’s classic profile, but seemed to hold up his noble head.
However, they did something else. Dressed in those jumpsuits, Elvis not only forged an image destined to go way beyond that of any other pop star, but also made him almost divine.
If proof is needed, look at the last concert, in 1977. Though swollen and fat, short of breath and pancake-coated with streams of sweat down his face, his signature haircut as stiff as a wig, Elvis raises himself from a faint opening number to reach a state similar to elevation.
Dressed in his white Mexican sundial suit, decorated front and back with an image of the Aztec sunstone depicting five successive worlds of the sun, Elvis moves slowly across the stage like a sacred idol, followed by a stage hand with a bundle of snow-white scarves over one arm. draped. One by one, the helper hands them over to Elvis, who briefly drapes each one around his neck for dedication before tossing it to eager pleas.
At this point, Elvis has crossed the boundaries of fashion and stardom. And although he would be dead very soon, Elvis Presley was brought to apotheosis at exactly this moment.
