October 16, 2016 |
Some time in the late 1990s – possibly 1997 – Michael Jackson decided to sample the delights of London Fashion Week by going to a Julien Macdonald show. He sat on the front row, wearing a black fedora and mirrored glasses, with a scarf partly obscuring his face, flanked on either side by a 6ft-wide security guard. Only it wasn’t Michael Jackson.
I was sitting a few people along from him and twigged it wasn’t the real Jackson but, rather, someone taking the Mick, on account of his fat, white-gloved hands – too large and spade-like to be Jackson’s. Plenty of people were fooled, though, and none too pleased at a deceit that could have backfired spectacularly had they filed news stories erroneously stating the King of Pop had been in attendance.
Which is probably why, in 2008, rumours that Prince was going to appear at a Matthew Williamson show were greeted with short shrift. “Oh sure,” people said. “Wendy and Lisa will probably be there, too. In a bath. Muttering, ‘Is the water warm enough?’”
I was less cynical. Principally because, the night before, Williamson had confided in me at a party that he had been approached by Prince’s people. Prince was interested in attending a show at London Fashion Week – not merely as a guest, though, which would have been epic enough. No: he also wanted to perform. “Don’t tell anyone,” Williamson said. And so I didn’t. Well, only my best friend. But not my news desk – just in case it didn’t happen, and I was left looking like some gullible Prince fantasist.
Except it did happen, and it was one of the weirdest, most memorable catwalk moments I’ve ever witnessed – even weirder than when Derek Zoolander and Hansel popped up on the Valentino catwalk last year. As Williamson showed his collection, Prince sat on the front row with his then-girlfriend, Chelsea Rodgers, singing a song called Chelsea Rodgers about – and I’m guessing here – Chelsea Rodgers, a model who, the lyrics informed us, had a “butt like a letter C”. Or maybe it was a “butt like a leather seat”, I’m not quite sure. Prince nerds may like to note that it was the second single from his 32nd album, Planet Earth, which – bizarrely – was initially released on CD and given away free with The Mail on Sunday. But let’s not dwell on that too much, for fear our heads explode.
How did the whole thing come about? “His girlfriend was a fan of my work,” remembers Williamson now. “Even though he’d said he wanted to perform at my show, we didn’t know for sure whether he’d actually turn up. He got there in the nick of time. He didn’t rehearse and arrived just as I was greeting Anna Wintour backstage. He sat in the audience between Trudie Styler and my dad, then as the beat kicked in, he got up from his seat and performed his track down the length of my catwalk. I was looking on through the monitor backstage, as were the models, completely in awe. The audience was amazed to be in the presence of such a legend. Nobody expected it at all. He was incredible on stage, and after the show he was playful, but also a real gentleman. I’ll always remember him as a musical legend, but also as a fun-loving man.”
Prince has always been and will always be my idol,” says Antonio Berardi. “He created his own sound and constructed both lyrics and arrangements in such an innovative way – just to hear ” If I was your Girlfriend ” with him singing in the female is both breathtaking and groundbreaking – as to influence the course of music for the past 30 years. The idea that most of his songs were sung, played, arranged and composed by him solely is amazing. He was the soundtrack to my life, the one person in the world I never wanted to meet, even if I had the chance to more than once, and the one person apart from friends and loved ones, who will remain “Forever in my Life ” perhaps my favourite song of all time.”
Prince loved fashion. And fashion loved him. One of his closest relationships was with Donatella Versace, for whom, in September 2006, he performed a surprise (at least to the ecstatic audience) gig after her womenswear show in Milan. He also performed in 2011 at a party to mark her collaboration with H&M in New York. In July 1999, he was one of the guests at a dinner held after a Versace couture show in Paris. I will never forget the sight of Prince, Madonna and George Lucas sitting together, chewing the fat (not literally – Prince was a vegetarian) at the same table, while we fashion editors tried desperately not to gawp. You never expect to have dinner with your idols. Especially when said idol is Prince.
“He was one of my closest friends,” Versace told The New York Times, shortly after his death on April 21. “I will always love him. I will always remember when he rented a club, only for him and me. We listened to his music and spoke about the young generation. Young people were so important to Prince. They have to follow the example he set, to believe in their heart, respect their own soul and never trade their own individuality. It is what made Prince outstanding and relevant forever.”
Prince’s music needs no one to speak up for it: it was unimpeachably brilliant, flowing in seemingly limitless supply from his genius mind. His personal style, however, was… let’s just say more of an acquired taste, although Versace is bang on with her “relevant forever” comment. When Madonna wore a daring Givenchy lace sheath to the Met Ball in May, many people were quick to lambast her look. Few recognised the nod to Prince contained within the cutaway circles that revealed her breasts and buttocks beneath a skin of lace. In 1991, Prince shocked attendees at the VMAs by performing Gett Off dressed in a laser-cut yellow catsuit, each butt cheek wantonly exposed. He did it first.
Madonna and Prince dated in the mid-1980s, a fact that makes me wish Instagram had been invented some decades earlier than it was, for frankly, there could not be enough evidence in the world where that union is concerned. According to a 1985 profile in People magazine, Madonna’s nickname for Prince was “the midget” (the 1980s weren’t very PC). Theirs was a playful, if tempestuous, relationship, with plenty of making out in the back of swanky cars. In the same profile, Madonna made a perceptive comment about Prince’s style persona. “He usually wants to be treated the exact opposite of the way he is dressed. His outfits say, ‘Touch me, lick me, love me, lust me’, but then he pretends he’s wearing a monk’s outfit. He needs to step back, look at his clothing and laugh at it.” Like she did, presumably.
While he never quite surpassed the shock tactic of appearing on the cover of his third album, Dirty Mind, dressed in a trench coat, a bandana and a very small pair of pants that revealed a tuft of pubic hair (this was back in 1980), Prince’s wardrobe never really ceased to be a talking point. To say he ploughed his own furrow is an understatement: you could cite any number of influences, from Jimi Hendrix through to Farrah Fawcett (that hair on his debut album!), but first and foremost, Prince was always Prince, a chameleon who managed to make every derivative his own. His purple period – one part Lady Di to two parts Sgt Pepper – was quintessentially 1980s; his peach and black period displayed a devotion to nude and fleshy tones that outdid even Kimmie K’s. In later years, his style was more honed. He returned again and again to flares, dandyish double-breasted jackets and polo necks, signed off with a pair of statement shades – most recently the “third eye” ones favoured in the period before his death.
But his most important legacy was surely his seismic contribution to the gender debate. Booed offstage by Rolling Stones fans shocked by his thigh-high stockings (he opened for them towards the end of 1981), Prince always rose above his critics, if not literally (he was only 5ft 2in), then metaphorically. Regardless of any opprobrium he attracted, he carried on, never afraid to wear stockings, heels, lace gloves, eyeliner and however much jewellery he fancied. “Am I straight or gay?” he sang in the track Controversy in 1981. “I’m not a woman / I’m not a man / I am something that you’ll never understand” he sang three years later on I Would Die 4 U. Prince didn’t merely sing about gender (If I Was Your Girlfriend, from 1987, is surely one of the most lyrically perceptive songs about women in his oeuvre), he challenged it continuously, decades before Caitlyn Jenner made it a mainstream, water-cooler talking point. If he followed in the footsteps of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, unlike those artists, androgyny wasn’t just a phase for him – it was a deep part of who he was. Most significantly of all, Prince was a black man expressing himself freely in the same way as white men had done. He showed generations of black men that they didn’t have to be hyper-masculine. “He made me feel comfortable with how I identify sexually, simply by his display of freedom from and irreverence for the archaic idea of gender conformity,” the singer Frank Ocean noted after Prince’s death. In this, certainly in the 1980s, he was a truly singular role model.
As a straight white female, I’m low down on the “in need of positive role models” list of priorities. But as a teenager growing up in a Scottish city that wasn’t so open-minded as to preclude its inhabitants shouting “slag” at girls in short skirts or “f**cking clown” at anyone who dared to experiment with fashion by deviating from the 1980s norm of a lemon V neck, stonewash jeans and trainers, Prince made me braver. He validated my choices. Listening to I Would Die 4 U before getting ready to go out on a Saturday night, I felt armoured against the slings and arrows of outrageous insults from casuals with zero imagination or taste. What did they know about cool, anyway? They didn’t know what Prince knew. “Cool means being able to hang with yourself,” Prince said. And he was right. Cool isn’t external. In his case, it was eternal, and it came from within.
Illustration by Charles Jeffrey
Taken from Issue 44 of 10 Men, TRIBE PACK QUEST, on newsstands now…
