On the second floor of Paisley Park, atop the “little kitchen” and just past the elegant dovecote wherein resides Majesty and Divinity, two archivists tirelessly attend to the fashion archives of the performer formerly and forever known as Prince. Bethany Hopman and Rebecca Jordan, who hail from Pennsylvania and Maryland, respectively, spend their days preserving and cataloging the thousands of jumpsuits, trenchcoats, high-waisted trousers, silk blouses, Lurex tunics, man heels (600 pairs thus far), pendants, and pj’s that constitute one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll closets of all time. (There are four archivists in total.) Some of Prince’s most iconic looks are on display on mannequins throughout Paisley’s public areas; when we visited last winter, some were on loan to the O2. But mostly, the clothes and accessories are wrapped in acid-free tissue and are packed in boxes, kept for eternity with the original sketches attached in a nearby binder.
And there are many, many, many binders. At one time, these rooms housed Prince’s in-house atelier, a full-service tailoring shop that made virtually everything he wore at the height of his fame and certainly everything worn by him and the Revolution in live performances and on film. The designers and tailors who worked for him communicated primarily through their drawings, which were interpretations of a general brief he’d thrown out (Barbarella meets the Godfather, say), and these sketches were placed in a binder with fabric swatches for his review. He would respond with sticky notes of approval or further instruction (“let’s do these in fuchsia and black, too”; “make these charms like Mayte’s purse”), and two weeks later, the process would begin again. In the meantime, the clothes would keep coming: Nehru jackets, matador boleros, skinny-hipped pants with a smidgen of flare, asymmetrical lapels, and single-suspender onesies, all rendered in variations of four-ply silk charmeuse and dupioni (internationally sourced through mail order). There was a mannequin made in his size as Prince himself did not, as a rule, do fittings. Jim Sherrin, the talented tailor who came to Prince from Guthrie Theater in the early ’80s and made all of those definitive slender-trouser looks, never touched the artist. Helen Hiatt, the brilliant wardrobe mistress who worked on various aspects of Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Timesbefore overseeing the entire studio for Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge, remembers that she would very occasionally be granted a fitting with Prince. “I finally said, ‘Prince, I am going to send a ruler over so that when you say one inch we know what you are talking about.’ We had to set some ground rules.”
So dig, if you will, this picture: a performer of stadium magnitude, at the apex of his career, with no stylists, no art directors, no contracts or monied deals with brands or haute couture houses, no outside consultants. Instead, he hired seamstresses and tailors, often from Minneapolis, which has a strong craft tradition and theater community, and he trusted them to interpret his rather extraordinary, gender-rules-be-damned notions in silk and lace and pearls. He would tear pages from women’s fashion magazines and let the studio interpret it for a rockin’ dude. He would say to Hiatt, “Can you write on my clothes?” And she would pick a font, get his okay, and take it to a friend’s house to be silk-screened in a basement.
Stacia Lang arrived at Paisley as a patternmaker in spring 1990 after working for a decade in New York in indie theater and on Broadway. When Hiatt left Paisley at the end of that year, Lang assumed a larger role in the design process, which she describes as thoroughly collaborative. “He was constantly generating ideas—middle of the night, middle of the tour—and doodling and sketching for every aspect of his creative life.” She brought Prince the idea of a low-slung trouser with a shoulder strap for Graffiti Bridge. She introduced him to heavy guipure lace—in citron or fuchsia—and brought that romantic futuristic edge to Sherrin’s precision tailoring. And remember the “butt out” suit for the 1991 Grammys? That was all Prince: “It was a week before the awards,” Lang recalls. “We used a lace we had used before for the ‘Insatiable’ video. We got the fabric dyed. Prince didn’t do any fittings: He didn’t want to be involved. Jim knew Prince’s body inside and out.” And so, the star went on national television, ass out, without a single alteration.
Both Hiatt and Lang remember working without limitations of any sort. “Here was a man who was changing music, changing fashion,” Hiatt says, “exploring who he was and who he wanted to be, and he put all his money where his mouth was. No was not an option.” Lang: “When I went to Paisley, it seemed there was no limit. Then, a year later, there was a screeching halt to the spending.”
Debbie McGuan arrived at Paisley in 1993 after twice sending a portfolio of designs to Minneapolis. A Chicago native, McGuan had been living in Paris and she cycled into the studio as Lang exited. She was with the artist for 14 years, although very rarely at Paisley proper. The wardrobe department moved for a time to downtown Minneapolis atop Prince’s Glam Slam club; but even when based in Minnesota (1994–1996), McGuan worked from home. For a time, she lived between Chicago and the hotels of Minneapolis, and for months, she would be on tour, drawing and sourcing. She sketched to his music (directive: “listen to this song and come up with what you think it looks like”) and to tear sheets from magazines. “He’d say, ‘I just have this feeling,’ and he wanted to see what you would bring to it.” What is fascinating about McGuan is that when she left the 21 Nights tour in August 2007, she went back to her steady job at Crate and Barrel. “I was never fancy,” she says. “Even when I was working for him, I was doing that. I was a babysitter. I did regular stuff.” And, she adds, “He was very smart, confident, but also willing to hear your side. He wanted people who were out in the world. I was able to bring that to him.”
Trusting, open-minded, down-to-earth: not qualities one associates with a rock star, especially one who lived in a gleaming white fortress in the back of beyond. And yet, something in Prince must have known to put his trust in solid folks with wild aesthetic hinterlands. Lori Marcuz and Cathy Robinson, a design duo from Toronto known as Call and Response, made jackets, shirts, and vests for the artist from 2011 until his death in 2016. They never met him, never spoke with him, never traveled to Paisley even when invited. (Robinson: “We didn’t have up-to-date passports.” Marcuz: “It had been a beautiful relationship the way it had been working. . . .”) And this is the way it worked: An assistant would call and request clothes, and a box would be sent. His assistants would “change all the time” but the pieces would not come back. Marcuz and Robinson would study YouTube clips to see how the clothes fit. That’s how they would make adjustments to his ever-slighter frame. And they were given no direction. Says Robinson: “We made whatever the heck we wanted.” There are nods to Jimi Hendrix in their work, and to Sly and the Family Stone. Everything they made for him was deliberately aged, elegantly threadbare and baroque, or, as they see it, “raw and dystopian.” “Everything was always a push,” Marcuz recalls. “They would call at midnight or text, and it was like, We’re on, let’s go.” Robinson: “It was tiring. You had no time. You would get frustrated. But any artistic sense of yourself was completely realized. It was magic.” The Call and Response duo’s relationship with Prince was so remote yet passionate, a long-distance love affair of a most original stripe. These women thought hard about the layers of his personality and his music as they scissored Rajasthani wall hangings into patchwork jackets, or overlaid metallic leather with fringe and cording, or washed and overdyed brocade until it felt like lace. And he must have felt that something in kind, because he wore their designs without alteration for magazine cover shoots, for his magnificent turn at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, for the Grammys and global television appearances (true story: Marcuz would take pictures of Prince on television for Robinson, who doesn’t own a TV). For a man who took his image very seriously, this was a relationship built on profound trust. (There is a tailor in Los Angeles named Arturo Padilla who made Prince’s silky loungewear; this, too, was a special long-distance partnership.)
And were there pieces by well-known designers in Prince’s closet? Hell yes: At Paisley, on a rack to be archived, are a smattering of Versace dress shirts, a Balmain jacket, and a mini-caftan top from Tory Burch. “I was surprised at how much off-the-rack clothing I came across,” says Jordan, whose job it has been to gather the star’s belongings in the wake of his sad death two years ago. Hanging on the same rack is an insane boatneck tunic by Padilla with an enormous photo-realistic cat face. “I like to think he wore it,” says Jordan with a smile.
Director: Chris Moukarbel
Cinematographer: Bobby Bukowski
Editors: Candice Young, Jen Harrington
Art Direction: Look Studios
Filmed At Paisley Park
Music “Let’s go crazy” by Prince
Special Thanks to:
The Prince Estate
Atom Factory
Warner Bros. Records
42 West
Universal Music Group
Trademarks owned by Paisley Park Enterprises, Inc., a wholly-owned entity of The Prince Estate.
[“Source-vogue”]