The Daily Telegraph (May 30th 2002)
'It's like a big dressing-up game'
No Doubt's Gwen Stefani is the queen of 'geek chic'. She talks to Hilary Alexander about blue hair, bindis - and wearing braces on her teeth
Pop-ska diva Gwen Stefani is exhausted. She has just clambered off a bus after a 36-hour round-trip to Germany and she has had only an hour to get ready for another performance to promote the band's new album, Rock Steady.
She does her own make-up - pale foundation, scarlet lips outlined in cranberry, gold and bronze eyes and false lashes with oodles of mascara. She then selects a Rasta-inspired T-shirt, a fluorescent yellow crochet top and a pair of men's khaki suit trousers, which she immediately turns into harem-pants by tying striped ribbons around the ankles. She clambers atop a pair of six-inch platform shoes and crams a funky, yellow leather baker-boy cap over her platinum hair extensions.
"Hey, you should have smelt me an hour ago, before I had a shower!" she screams at the studio audience, before launching into a wild, cancan high-kick - on those heels.
"Normally, I can dance more, but these heels are a bit of a fashion victim thing. Sometimes you have to sacrifice your performance for your heels," she admits later, as she relaxes in her dressing room.
Stefani, the 32-year-old lead singer of American band No Doubt, is an unlikely style icon. A California girl who couldn't look more unlike a bronzed, air-brushed beach bunny, she wore bindis before Madonna; kept braces on her teeth for last year's glitzy Council of American Fashion Designers annual gala in New York; dyed her hair pink when her relationship with Gavin Rossdale of Bush ran into trouble; wore a bra over an Aertex vest in her band's Hey Baby video; and has been variously described as the leader of "geek chic" and "dork dressing".
These labels don't faze her. She calls herself "a thrift store junkie" and has been making her own clothes and creating her own style ever since her mother first made her a replica of the dress Julie Andrews wore in The Sound of Music for a high school talent show in Anaheim - she played the piccolo.
Her look is entirely her own creation - and she has fun doing it. Earlier this year, she collected the Rock Style "Oscar" at the VH1/ Vogue fashion awards, wearing a red cutout leotard, black and white, oversized, dogtooth culottes with black fishnets and red and black spike heels.
Then there's the wild Rasta-inspired denim pieces by Bob Marley's daughter, Stella, that she discovered while the band was recording in Jamaica, which she mixes with baggy pants vests and lots of jewellery.
Stefani loves clothes so much that she is planning to launch her own line next year at Los Angeles fashion week. Her tour wardrobe travels in a vast silver trunk, which opens out into a double walk- in closet. She keeps track of all her outfits with a series of Polaroids. "It's like dressing up, you know - a big dressing-up game."
She wants to point out, however, that the famous braces were not a fashion statement. "It was when I started getting money from Tragic Kingdom [the band's first hit album] and I wanted braces so my teeth wouldn't curve inwards like my grandmother's. I don't know if it's made that much difference, but I've got good teeth. I haven't got a single cavity. Look!" she says, opening her mouth wide and saying "aaah".
It's time, too, she says, to change her make-up a little. She thinks the drag queen look is getting a bit "been there, done that". "I'm thinking about doing a bit of a Pamela Anderson vibe, you know? But perhaps only offstage, because otherwise nothing shows up on camera."
Later this summer, she will marry British-born Rossdale at a London church, wearing a one-off, made-to-order gown designed by John Galliano. She has a second fitting in Paris with Galliano this week and is beside herself with excitement.
"If I could find my laptop, I'd show you the sketch! It is going to be incredible. It's totally him and totally me," she says. "I met John at the CFDA awards and we were both wearing braces. I didn't have any idea what my wedding dress could be like. He said to me, e- mail me a song or a picture and so I sent this collage. And then he sent back this beautiful sketch, hand-drawn in shades of white. It was perfect.
"I can't say any more, because I don't want to give too much away and spoil it for Gavin. But it is going to be beautiful. When I had my first fitting, John said to me that making the dress was like making a sculpture, in the way it was going to evolve. And he's right; he's an absolute genius.
"You know, I used to be so anti-fashion, so anti all those brands and labels you'd see in magazines. It was mainly because, I guess, I thought nobody would wear them. And then, when I started making money and I could actually get my hands on a few things, I began to understand the artistic creativity."
No Doubt's new single, Hella Good, from their fifth album, Rock Steady, is released on Monday