BOB Dylan is many things to many people and everything to some, but also
something most may not expect: an arbiter of style and a reference point for
fashion-conscious girls everywhere. All the stuff that's in stores this fall -
skinny blazers, stovepipe jeans, boatnecked, French-philosopher striped shirts,
fitted peacoats, flat-heeled, mod boots, Wayfarer sunglasses, striped scarves -
it's all Dylan, totally owned and not done better than the chain-smoking,
puckish, "Don't Look Back"-era Dylan.
"I'm basically dressed like Bob Dylan in the '60s right now," says Ellen
Carpenter, style editor at Rolling Stone. "And I never really thought about him
affecting women's fashion that much. He so embodied that whole working-class,
Everyman look, especially with the motorcycle boots, which are just like the
Frye boo really thought about him affecting women's fashion that much. He so
embodied that whole working-class, Everyman look, especially with the motorcycle
boots, which are just like the Frye boots girls are wearing now, and the
Wayfarers, which they're reissuing. Those were his trademark."
There was that great picture recently shot of Cate Blanchett playing a
version of Dylan - young, Afro'd, skinny - on the set of the upcoming movie "I'm
Not There," in which different actors play different incarnations of Dylan, and
which reinforces the notion that he can be adopted and interpreted by anyone,
even if she's a clotheshorse who doesn't own a single Dylan album.
He's always been fashion-conscious. (It is, if you think about it, part of
the job description; name an important musician who isn't.) In the '70s, Dylan
donned leisure suits, leather, glam-rock-inspired black eyeliner and,
inexplicably, whiteface; in the '80s, "Miami Vice"-style blazers and earrings;
in the '90s, it was lots of suits, especially with Western-style ties. Today, he
favors a highly cultivated look that seems to reference the American West,
19th-century poets, wandering troubadours, and used car salesmen. And it works.
But it's his '60s look - which he wrote about, fleetingly, in his memoir
"Chronicles: Volume One" - that keeps coming back and getting spun different
ways. It's the look he cultivated as a young, porous artist who absorbed
everything he could while inhabiting downtown New York.
| 1 | 2 |  |
