Adorned in rhinestones and elevating her 5-foot stature with sky-high heels and voluminous blonde wigs, Dolly Parton often joked, “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap!”
Parton’s looks on stage and off reflected both her Tennessee roots and her embodiment of over-the-top feminine glamour, an aesthetic articulated in her album title and self-anointed nickname “Backwoods Barbie.” She was rarely seen without long acrylic nails, a full face of makeup, and heapings of glitter.
The prolific musician, actor and philanthropist, who died on Tuesday at 80 years old, always had a tongue-in-cheek response to criticisms about her larger-than-life sense of style. She quipped about her hair being a fire hazard, would play her hit ‘9 to 5’ with nothing but her fire red acrylic nails as the instrument, and she unabashedly loved flashy clothes: shoulder pads, plunging necklines, a cinched waist, lace were all sartorial non-negotiables for the singer. But she paired it with a keen sense of self-awareness that only made her devout fanbase love her more.
“When I moved to Nashville in 1964, I already had some ideas about what I wanted to look like onstage — and off,” she wrote in her book “Behind the Seams” in 2023. “Country stars had to have big hair and some sparkles, and you had to have a Cadillac. I had the big hair but not yet the Cadillac — or enough sparkles.” She related to the clothes worn by famous fixtures on stage of the Grand Ole Opry, like Jean Shepard and didn’t shy away from the unconventional things that influenced her, telling People she even took inspiration from the famously risqué Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogs she flipped through when she was young.
Parton’s version of glamour wasn’t afraid to flirt with bad taste. “I want to look a little bit, you know, trashy,” she said last year. “I don’t mean it in a bad way. I just like that kind of almost artificial look. I like the overdone. I like the bleached hair.”
Parton’s conviction was the backbone of her persona, and she recalled in “Behind the Seams” that when she first signed to Monument Records in 1965, the label president wanted to “flatten” her hair and dress her in “streamlined” clothes more fitting of ’60s pop stars. “But I hated everything about it. I felt naked,” she said.
Even her softer looks had volume, such as Parton’s cover for her 1973 chart-topping album “Jolene,” in stripes and billowing white shoulders and with her blonde mane framing her face.
But on stage and on red carpets she gravitated towards hot pink jumpsuits, icy blue off-shoulder gowns or pearl-encrusted cropped jackets. She worked with designers like Bob Mackie, who created a wing-like “Butterfly” gown for her TV special “Dolly & Carol in Nashville” in 1979, and dressed her and Oprah in complimentary looks for Parton’s variety show “Dolly.” In 2000, she attended a White House luncheon to talk about her book gifting charity Imagination Library in a vibrant, fringed yellow skirt suit with matching heels.
Fringe was another Parton trademark. Her looks often incorporated classic country motifs like cowboy hats or bell-bottom jeans, though usually made Dolly-appropriate with a healthy helping of sparkles and vibrant hues.
Parton wore some 300 custom outfits a year, styled by her longtime collaborator Steve Summers. He told Vogue that everything was custom for Parton, even if started as an off-the-rack dress. “There is an outfit in production every single day,” he said. “If she’s doing personal appearances, 10 outfits in a day is not unusual.”
Many stars have borrowed from Parton over the years: her goddaughter Miley Cyrus has appeared with her in synchronized outfits; Beyoncé has channeled her for her own take on “Jolene;” and Sabrina Carpenter has dueted with her, too, leaning into the unapologetic femininity (and butter-yellow curls) that made Parton an icon. But Parton’s style is something anyone can slip on, and her fans have often played dress-up with her, too. The British photographer Alice Hawkins spent a decade documenting herself and others living out their own Dolly-fied American dreams in her image, published in the book “Dear Dolly” in 2022.
Parton even once joined the fun by entering a Dolly lookalike contest at a West Hollywood gay bar — which she lost. “I say it’s a good thing I was a girl or I’d be a drag queen,” she said in an interview recounting the episode.
And though guests who make the pilgrimage to her Tennessee theme park Dollywood may not dress as her — per the official rules, since she herself often attended — many still pay small tributes to her style with a touch of glitz.
Parton may have had a replicable sartorial style, but the core of it was a message that anyone could adopt, bedazzled or not: “I’m gonna be me, ‘cause I know who I am and you don’t.”
