Vogue (November 2000)
Most Stylist Video: No Doubt
By the time you read this, the accompanying photograph will be hopelessly out of date. That’s just one of the pitfalls of trying to pin down a star like Gwen Stefani, for whom self-invention is a never-ending process. "I just went blonde again,” Stefani says sunnily from her Los Angeles home. “I'm over pink.” She wanted to make the change months ago, before No Doubt’s recent tour (the platinum-selling band also includes guitarist Tom Dumont, bassist Tony Kanal, and drummer Adrian Young), but she felt there were bigger considerations. “I was afraid all the kids would show up with pink hair, and if I didn’t have it, too, it would be a slap in the face,” she explains. “And they did! It was cute. We were like a little pink family.” The life of a style supernova, you see, isn’t all bindis and bonbons: Stefani doesn't just have a reputation to uphold—she’s got responsibilities.
Not that the singer has ever seemed anything less than up to it. When No Doubt’s joyful, funked-up ska pop burst onto the MTV radar, the cord-and-flannel-clad grunge era was already coughing its death rattle. Stefani, with her retro-rolled bangs, Indian-influenced accessories, and surfer-girl half-shirts, was instantly captivating; she skillfully combined tomboy and Bettie Page sensibilities into a postfeminist hybrid that masses of teenage girls admired and adopted. “I was just doing what I always did,” she says of her breakthrough look in 1995's "Just a Girl” video. "I really curled my hair like that, and those were my pants. I made that shirt. That was my real look, and it was weird to all of a sudden be called on it.”
Eventually, Stefani did what any woman faced with a crowd mimicking her every fashion move would do: She mixed it up. In the award-winning video for “Ex-Girlfriend”— director Hype Williams nicked the concept from a Japanese cartoon— Stefani's look is anime-inspired: long fuchsia braids, schoolgirl kilt, and jagged-looking eyelashes. The breakup song is recast as a dark revenge story, with Stefani as a mournful hit woman assigned to off her ex. Basically, the theme is an overt dramatization of what has been the subtext of the singer’s image all along: Stefani may seem like a nice girl, but watch out. Mess with her, and she’s prepared to get rough and, of course, to look very good doing it.