From the editor's desk August 2004: a conversation between Ingrid Sischy and Camille Paglia

INGRID SISCHY: It's our annual music issue, so I thought it would be good to talk about a subject you've been interested in for a long time: rock-star style. Take it away.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, from the moment rock 'n' roll was born in the 1950s, most aspiring rock stars modeled themselves on Elvis Presley: the brooding rebel in proletarian blue jeans, half hipster, half hood, like Marion Brando and James Dean. But by the mid-1960s, when I was in college, the British mod trend had turned rock stars into dandies. It was a rejection of the corporate gray-flannel suits of the conformist 1950s. Young men grew their hair long and started experimenting with fine fabrics and bright colors--silks and velvets, Indian paisley patterns, flowing scarves like Jimi Hendrix's pink feather boa. From American hippies came beaded necklaces and Navajo silver bracelets and turquoise rings. That was the great high glamour moment of rock-star fashion, which went from the late '60s to the mid-'70s, when young men were strutting like peacocks.

IS: It was also totally plugged into the sexual revolution.

CP: Yes. It wasn't just women who were suddenly liberated by the pill. Most rock stars were ostentatiously heterosexual, but there was a strongly androgynous and homoerotic quality to their self-presentation in that period, which remains a template for musicians today. Rock stars are always defining themselves either for or against the template. For instance, Lenny Kravitz, like Prince in the '80s, is constantly channeling '60s style.

IS: What about women rock stars of that era, like Janis Joplin?

CP: Janis Joplin was an oddity, a Texas blues singer fronting a San Francisco acid-rock band. Her style was eclectic and bizarre, a kind of slatternly, New Orleans hooker look with Moroccan fabrics and backless harem slippers. It was almost Jean Harlowesque--a ripe, womanly thing that was out of sync with contemporary fashion.

IS: Who else?

CP: Patti Smith was totally revolutionary as a sexual persona. Unlike Grace Slick and Marianne Faithfull, she was a major gender bender, modeling herself on her idol (and mine), Keith Richards: tough, scrawny, ravaged. In Robert Mapplethorpe's stunning photo for her 1975 debut album, Horses, she's wearing a man's tie and draping a suit jacket over her shoulder like Frank Sinatra.

IS: Deborah Harry?

CP: A brilliant singer! What crystal clarity and perfect emotional pitch. In the '70s, Blondie turned rock retro. After all the grandiosity of arena rock and message-heavy protest songs, rock returned to its simple, peppy pop origins to refresh itself. As a performer, Harry also looked backwards to reappropriate pre-feminist images like Marilyn Monroe but with the avant-garde irony of the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol milieu. There's a direct line from Harry to Belinda Carlisle of the Go-Go's, who also jumped back to the '50s: "We're going to be like cheerleaders and beauty-pageant contestants and sorority queens!" In one video, they're even zipping around on water skis. Fashion-wise, Belinda Carlisle as a spunky, bratty blonde was the crucial transition between Debbie Harry and Madonna in the '80s.

IS: What's so interesting about the '60s and '70s is that what was going on socially and politically merged with what was going on visually and stylistically. So the style embodied the sexual revolution, the gay revolution, and the civil rights revolution.

CP: Yes, it was a cultural explosion that transformed music. Thanks to Bob Dylan, rock was cross-fertilized with folk music, with its cutting-edge social issues. The Beatles' first albums were all about girls and teenage heartbreak, but once they met Dylan, John Lennon began writing lyrics with searing social consciousness.

IS: And then there were the album covers that emerged at the time. It was a new kind of folk art.

CP: It was tremendous. Most album covers from the '50s were boring and generic. Then, all of a sudden, boom! Sixties album covers were scrutinized by my generation as if they were holy writ--like David Bailey's gritty photos of the sullen, pockmarked Rolling Stones. Rock stars now began to think about image, fashion, packaging.

IS: But some '50s album covers were fantastic too--like the Blue Note jazz series. It was a dynamic moment in graphics and typefaces. For me, truthfully, some of that '60s psychedelia stuff got kind of tedious after a while.

CP: Everything becomes a cliche. But at the start, it was incredible--the surrealistic album covers of the Beatles' Revolver [1966] and Cream's Disraeli Gears [1967] or the distorted fish-eye lens cover of Jimi Hendrix's first album [Are You Experienced?, 1967]. Rock poster art was also innovative, reviving the late-19th century graphic styles of Alphonse Mucha, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Aubrey Beardsley. Tiffany and Lalique also had a comeback, thanks mainly to gay connoisseurs. So there was this strange confluence of the psychedelic '60s with art nouveau and fin de siecle aestheticism and decadence, the Edwardian look of the 1890s. The pioneering fashion synthesis came out of London, where young artsy types were pillaging antique-clothing stores along Portobello Road. It was a mind-boggling fashion fantasia: People mixed and matched clothes like costumes, whether it was a violet pin-striped Edwardian suit or a brass-buttoned pea coat and sailor's bellbottoms from military surplus. And then there were the futuristic, geometric mod outfits coming from Carnaby Street. It was one of the great fashion moments of the 20th century.