With her gaudy rhinestones and ever mushrooming hair, the country star pioneered a new vision of femininity
Dolly Parton, country star, actor and philanthropist, dies aged 80
Parton’s peerless career turned country music cliches inside out
Share your tributes and memories of Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton’s voluminous hair and rhinestone-festooned outfits were so essential to her fame that her quips about her appearance have become almost as well-known as her lyrics.
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” is perhaps her most memorable quotation, and is typical of the self-depreciating wit she employed to talk about her appearance.
She wrote about her style in her songs, too, from her 1967 hit Dumb Blonde to 2008’s Backwoods Barbie, though in reality there was nothing cheap, or dumb, about her image. With huge blond status wigs – Tennessee by way of the court of Versailles – a fondness for glitter and high heels and tightly cut clothes that showed off her exaggerated proportions, she made herself as recognizable as Coca-Cola while employing and subverting the tropes of femininity and of country music.
Parton never failed to poke fun at her own appearance. Her hair was a “fire hazard”, she would say, or “I’m not a fashion icon; I’m an eyesore” – but her look was highly deliberate. Never once did she waver from the aesthetic she described to Allure in 2020 as “gaudy, flamboyant, fun, comfortable – for me – noticeable”.
Parton grew up in poverty, in rural Sevier county, Tennessee, one of 12 children. One of her most moving songs – Coat of Many Colors – recalled that experience through her memory of the clothing her mother made for her from scraps.
She often said she modeled her look on a woman others called the “town tramp”, but who held a glamorous appeal for Parton, being one of the few women she saw who wasn’t mired in childcare and housework. She was “flamboyant”, Parton told the Guardian: “She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’”
Parton’s sharecropper father and preacher grandfather hated the way Dolly looked, and she was punished for it. In her 2023 book, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, she wrote that her appearance was a bone of contention at the beginning of her career too. When she got her first record deal, Fred Foster, the boss of Monument Records, wanted “to change my style into a 1960s pop look”. “They wanted to flatten my hair. They wanted me to look more chic and wear more streamlined clothes. I hated everything about it. I felt naked.”
He wasn’t the only one telling her, at the time, “you look more like a hooker than you do a singer.” But she told them, she said: “I’ve got great ideas and I’m a creative person. I think I’ve got something more to sell than just the way I look.”
Her look often meant that people didn’t take her seriously, she said – particularly men who would think “I was as silly as I looked”.
She felt that her career took longer to take off because of this – but it became an advantage in business because, as she said in 2009: “By the time they think that I don’t know what’s going on I done got the money and gone.”
Prevailing trends sometimes influenced her look – there were skintight bedazzled jumpsuits and platforms in the 1970s; in the 1980s she flirted with shoulder pads, but as with any style, she would “Dolly-ize them” and add her own personal spin.
