As trends like “quiet luxury” and “stealth wealth” dominate fashion headlines, and the clothes of the minimalist ’90s politely whisper their way back into our wardrobes, there is one woman who will never give in to such restraint: Dolly Parton.
Hailed as a national treasure, an American saint and our greatest unifying force (never mind Taylor Swift), not to mention her musical chops, Parton has, over the past 60 years, become a legend while wearing clothes as subtle as a box of glitter glue. Her dominant style theme has always been more is more, and her new book, “Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones,” celebrates an enormous slice of her enormous wardrobe — from her childhood Coat of Many Colors to the disco-ball suit that she wore to the Academy of Country Music Awards in 2022. (How does she sit in it? Answer, “I don’t!”)
It takes a village to keep Parton that dolled up. In 10 photo-packed chapters, the star gives voice to her clothing designers, costumers, makeup artists, hairstylists, photographers, longtime creative director and fashion archivists (first her childhood friend, now her niece Rebecca Seaver, who is also the book’s curator), who share their stories of working with Parton.
Yes, it’s as fun as you’d imagine, but when Parton started out, the higher-ups wanted less fun and a lot less skin. She signed her first recording and writing contract with Monument Records in 1965, only a year after she arrived in Nashville. There was no talk of plastic surgery; what they wanted was a make-under. Parton was told, “Nobody’s ever going to take you serious as a songwriter or a singer if you look like that, because you look more like a hooker than you do a singer.” She replied, “Well, tough. This is who I am. They’ll get used to it!” And America didn’t just get used to it, we love it, and we now expect Parton to be wearing something that only she, Mae West and Louis XIV could pull off. “I’ve always loved feathers,” Parton declares. “Nothing is greater than leather,” she confides. She also adores chiffon, beads, bedazzled jeans and dressing as sexy Santa Claus. The only thing in fashion the singer doesn’t love: minimalism.
But where did her unshakable confidence come from? In the first chapter, Parton makes it known that her family in Sevier County, in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee, gave her those unbreakable wings. Parton, the fourth of 12 children, started life in clothes made from flour and feed sacks, applying eyeliner with her mother’s burned matches, and coveting red high heels that came in a charity box. (“I loved high heels even before I knew I was gonna be short!” And she really does. She wears them in her house. Even her golf shoes have heels.) By the time she went to high school, Parton decided to look “cheap and gaudy,” and her mother trusted her to go for it.
It’s that journey from mountain girl who was allowed to sparkle, to young woman who was asked to sparkle less, to icon who sparkled all she darn pleased that makes this book far more than a fashion archive. Dolly has turned the lens on herself before, most recently in “Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics.” And the odes have been good too, especially Sarah Smarsh’s “She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs” (2020). But no other book has been so focused on the look — big blond curls and outfits that make Barbie seem normcore — and how her clothes are an act of rebellion that became integral to her rise.
“Behind the Seams” delivers a unique opportunity: to hang out in Parton’s closet while she chats her way around a lifetime of looks. There’s the red dress she’s wearing on the cover of her album “Burning the Midnight Oil,” the picture taken in her den where she wrote songs like “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene.” And there’s her rhinestone “crusted” pink gown she wore when she won female vocalist of the year at the 1975 Country Music Awards. (Taking in the looks while listening to the audio version of the book is a full Dolly experience, as they’ve added 20 songs and snippets of her speeches and TV appearances.)
Parton’s star really began to rise in 1974, when she had three songs hit number one on the country charts. She hired new management and went after the pop world, her music and unmistakable look helping her right along. In the late ’70s she was the subject of a Rolling Stone feature photographed by Annie Leibovitz that described her as a “honey-wigged, golden-throated, flashing-eyed, jewel-encrusted, lush-bodied, feisty enchantress of a songwriter and a singer.” Her crossover album “Here You Come Again” came shortly thereafter, selling a million copies. The blockbuster 1980 film “9 to 5” made her a movie star. Hollywood kept calling, and she started wearing slinkier clothes, trying out Bob Mackie designs like Cher, and had her hundreds of wigs teased even higher. (“People would ask me how long it took to do my hair, and I’d tell them, ‘I don’t know, I’m never there.’”)
But through it all, the most honored female country performer of all time has remained the girl who pulled on wash-and-go polyester jumpsuits in Nashville and busked for hamburgers. Though her clothes say “diva,” her attitude does not. Beyond the stage, Parton’s philanthropic work, through her Dollywood Foundation and beyond it, has helped finance educational costs, donated books and helped coronavirus research, among other causes. “In so many years working with her, I’ve never seen her lose her cool,” says her longtime designer Robért Behar. “Once, we did the clothes for a video before we knew the location, which turned out to be Death Valley — in August. She was wearing an aluminum foil dress. I was like, ‘Oh my God, she’s going to die!’ But only consummate professionalism came from her.”
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At 77, Parton remains that professional, while also a walking, talking, drawling, singing, laughing celebration of the human spirit — in rhinestones.
Karin Tanabe is the author of six novels, including “A Woman of Intelligence,” “The Gilded Years” and, most recently, “Sunset Crowd.”
Behind the Seams
My Life in Rhinestones
By Dolly Parton with Holly George-Warren and Rebecca Seaver
Ten Speed Press. 336 pp. $50
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