In Artist Uniform, a column for Highsnobiety, Chris Erik Thomas traces how personal style shapes an artist's identity.
There’s no Dolly Parton without the packaging. Yes, Parton’s impact is indisputable — she racked up 11 Grammys, had more than 50 nominations, and was inducted into both the Country Music and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But picture Parton in your mind, and the mental image will be all those glittering, gaudy rhinestones and six-inch heels; the click-clacking acrylic nails and architecturally sculpted platinum-blonde wigs.
No artist did sartorial power dressing quite like Dolly.
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Parton didn’t just wear looks; she engineered her image piece by piece, making the art of dressing as important as her award-winning music. Her signature style — cartoonish “Backwoods Barbie” camp, inspired by everything from lingerie catalogs to town tramps — has inspired a legion of fans. Trying to encompass Dolly’s relationship with clothing would require a dissertation, or a literal book (like, say, her own 2023 memoir Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones).
That’s what makes the news of Parton’s passing on Tuesday, at age 80, so gutting. It’s as if a supermassive hole — approximately the size of her colossal persona, as opposed to her 5-foot-tall frame — has been ripped from the cultural fabric. Which actually feels fitting, given how important fabric was to her iconography.
Just look at “Coat of Many Colors.” Few songs distill the “Dolly-ness” of the singer quite like this autobiographical 1971 track. It tells the story of Parton’s mom stitching disused scraps into a patchwork coat, when she was one of a dozen kids living in her parents’ log cabin in rural Tennessee. The singer always came back to the track, translating it into a children’s picture book in 1996 and a TV movie in 2015.
Parton may have graduated from home-sewn outerwear to extravagant fashion iconography, filling literal warehouses with decades of her looks, but the tension between high and low always sat at the core of her image. So did its sheer Americanness, making her countrified catnip for fashion designers.
Alessandro Michele-era Gucci put an airbrushed image of Parton on the back of a sleeveless denim jacket for its Spring/Summer 2019 — placing her visage side-by-side with American cultural icons like Mickey Mouse — while Parton superfan Jeremy Scott dedicated not one but two rhinestone-heavy Moschino collections to mining her signature style. She even got in on the action herself, releasing multiple seasons of apparel with Good American and a jewelry line with Kendra Scott.
Driving it all wasn’t just Parton’s passion for fashion, but a structural framework built on a surgical attention to detail — led by her creative director and chief costumer of 30 years, Steve Summers. Every wig, every rhinestone, every heel was deliberately chosen, reinforcing Parton’s brand: a woman completely in control of herself, who turned the “blonde bimbo” stereotype from a punchline into a point of pride.
That’s the beauty of Dolly’s clothes; they were never just clothes. Her image was a 4D chess game, becoming both the joke and the rebuttal. Camp, yes, but genius. We may have to learn to live in a post-Dolly world, but the lesson that self-invention can be both armor and art isn’t going away.
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