Dolly Parton’s flamboyant style: ‘I’m not a fashion icon; I’m an eyesore’

Dolly Parton spent her final years insisting she was no fashion icon. In a 2023 interview with Vogue, she laughed off the label entirely: "I always laugh when I get called a fashion icon... I'm more of an eyesore! Only because I overdo it." The remark resurfaced this week in a wave of retrospectives after the singer's death at age 80, with The Guardian noting that her quips about her appearance had become "almost as well-known as her lyrics."

Parton's look was never accidental. She described her aesthetic to Allure in 2020 as "gaudy, flamboyant, fun, comfortable – for me – noticeable," and she maintained it with the precision of a costume department. Her longtime collaborator, designer Steve Summers, who served as creative director of the Dollywood atelier for decades, confirmed that the image was entirely hers.

"Dolly created the image," Summers told The Guardian. "She laid out all the ground rules. I just followed them." Parton's style was rooted in a childhood memory of a woman others called the "town tramp," but whom she saw as glamorous. "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," Parton told The Guardian.

"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 wrote in her 2023 book Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones that her sharecropper father and preacher grandfather hated the way she looked, and that her first record label boss, Monument Records' Fred Foster, tried to flatten her hair and make her look more chic. "I felt naked," she wrote.

She refused to change, and the look became a business asset. As she put it in 2009, "By the time they think that I don't know what's going on I done got the money and gone." The numbers behind the image were staggering.

Parton amassed hundreds of wigs, which she joked about constantly: "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.'" Her influence reached high fashion, with Alessandro Michele's Gucci spring/summer 2019 collection and Jeremy Scott's Moschino autumn/winter 2016 show both referencing her aesthetic, according to Hello! magazine. Yet Parton never took the title of icon seriously.

"I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable, that's the easiest thing in the world to do," she said, a line Hello! called one of many "pearls of wisdom" she delivered over the years.