Vogue (October 2002)
Magic’s In The Makeup…
… and the ostrich-hemmed ball gown, gladiator elf boots, opalescent feathered crown. Such is the wizardry of Galliano’s Dior. But, Lynn Yaeger discovers, the real magic’s in Gwen Stefani, a die-hard thrifter with a couture soul.
Three gigantic hats, headdresses really, are sitting on a table in Annie Leibovitz’s studio: One looks like a fur- covered tom-tom pierced with thick wooden sticks, another resembles a trapper’s cap except that it has a three foot-high corrugated cardboard crown sporting pheasant or, perhaps, quail quills, and a third is made of vast quantities of black net, opalescent feathers, and what can only be strips of plastic garbage bags. Taken together, the three, with their fearless, wacky embrace of materials high and low, are haute couture at its most modern.
Gwen Stefani, lead singer of the pop band No Doubt, takes one look at the hats, which were created by Stephen Jones for John Galliano’s Dior couture show, and in the nicest possible way says she’d prefer, really, to model only the last one. “I just don’t love fur enough to upset my audience,” she explains in a sweet, firm voice. “I’m all about my music-making people happy. I don’t want to be a controversial person. I mean, who knows? All of us are right, all of us are wrong.” Her reluctance to wear the hats throws the shoot into quiet chaos, since Leibovitz, especially, had her heart set on photographing Stefani in all three headdresses. (“I’ll complain about it till I die,” Leibovitz is heard to murmur later.) But in the end no one crosses Gwen, a woman whose own quirky front-row appearance last July in a Dior ensemble that consisted of a transparent hooded dress over a pair of cropped balloon pants, a brown straw boater, and a pair of fingerless gloves suddenly turned her into modem couture’s most unlikely and irresistible standard-bearer.
Stefani is a spectacularly unpretentious celebrity: She wears her fame as lightly as a Dior mannequin balances a showgirl hat. Nevertheless, despite her aw-shucks demeanor she is unwittingly, compulsively chic. Her personal style—a pastiche of thrift-shop ingenuity and high-wattage designer glamour—has made her an icon of fashion exuberance and post-punk comic grandeur: In 2001, she received not one but two VH1 / Vogue Fashion Awards, for “Visionary Video” (with Moby) and for “Rock Style.” “One thing about awards is that you always say they don’t mean a flicking thing—you’re like, ‘Who cares?,’ ” she says, shaking her platinum head, “until you actually win. When you win it’s pretty exciting.”
Stefani, who is in town expressly to model Galliano’s Dior haute couture offerings for Vogue, shows up for her fitting accoutred in the kind of eclectic, cheerfully sexy outfit she is famous for: low-slung flared jeans, a black tank top, a green plaid newsboy cap, a long green chiffon leopard-print scarf, and a pair of spectacular black and-red stilettos with pointed toes and zippers at their ankles. When she’s asked the kind of question fashionable women ask each other all the time—“Whose shoes are those?”—she looks blank and replies, “I don’t know any names,” then peeks inside and reads, “Patricia Cox?” “Patrick Cox,” her hairdresser, Danilo, who himself is shod in scuffed lime Nikes, corrects her.
“I never knew anything about high-fashion designers,” she says, taking a break before applying her makeup (porcelain visage, puffy scarlet Marilyn lips)—something she always does herself. “I find that whole world kind of scary. I’ve been to only four shows in my life: Westwood, Ghost, and two of Galliano’s for Dior couture. I loved his show last January the best—it was like watching characters from a painting. I can’t believe somebody can think that stuff up in their head: the fabric, the details; every bit blows my mind. But I never thought of wearing it! I look at it as art. When I first met John, I was so starstruck. I actually cried when he walked down the catwalk. It’s strange that a designer would be the one who would really get to me.”
Stefani may not know many designers’ names other than Galliano’s, but she’s always been interested in style. As a teenager in Orange County, California, in the late eighties, she favored a mod-ska look-slim pencil skirt, checkered vest, little sweater, bobbed hair- while the rest of the kids at school were copying Madonna. “I’m not much of a shopper anymore; I don’t have time. First and foremost, I like to write music; and when I’m done writing, dressing up for me is a reward. It’s like Halloween, not having to grow up. When I was a kid my mom made us dresses. She made me the first thing I ever wore onstage: a dress just like Julie Andrews’s in The Sound of Music, made of—what do you call it?— tweed. With schoolgirl pleats. She wears it when she sings ‘I Have Confidence.’ ” Did it give Stefani confidence? “Hell, yes!”
From tweed, Stefani went on to those zippered tummy-baring baggies and one-shouldered sequined tops that so marked her early career. “That was a total rip-off of Debbie Harry,” she admits, slightly shamefaced. In any case, the look was so influential, and so touched the hearts of her young audience, that to this day girls show up at No Doubt concerts in lovingly rendered imitations. “People started dressing like me at the shows—my old look—and they did it better than me! I started getting ideas from them!”
You can get the girl out of the Goodwill, but you can’t get the Goodwill out of the girl. When Stefani recently stayed at the Plaza Athenee on the Avenue Montaigne—Galliano’s idea—she could not bring herself to set a stiletto into the quarter’s rarefied boutiques. “I would never go into stores like that! You know what I do dream about, though? Being in a fashion show. But then again there’s a lot of pressure, walking down a catwalk next to those little teeny models,” confesses the woman whose perfect midriff is the hope and despair of millions around the world. (Stefani has actually done a lot of thinking about putting on her own runway show: She is working on a clothing line and plans to populate a future catwalk with “all my dancer friends.”)
Recently, the singer has had the opportunity to observe the inner workings of couture close up: Galliano is designing the gown for her upcoming wedding to fellow musician Gavin Rossdale of Bush. “It’s not done yet— I’m having fittings. The next version is the actual fabric. It’s so fun. I love watching the guys. They don’t even speak. There’s, like, John, another designer guy, and two seamstresses. John will go like this,” she wafts a hand airily, “and they all know' exactly what he means!” Pressed for details, she reminds me that this is, after all, her wedding gown. “I’m not telling! Except the thing about the dress is, it’s really traditional but really not. Totally me. I’m traditional in a lot of ways, but my life is not a traditional life.”
The ostrich-hemmed ball gowns and Floradora Girl frocks that Stefani is being fitted for today are hardly the stuff of convention. As if the dresses weren’t sufficiently arresting, Stefani also sports the trash-bag headdress and totters on platforms with turned-up toes and lacing up the legs—gladiator elf shoes. As she clomps over to the full-length mirror she calls out, “I wanna be a fashion Vogue girl! Whee! Do I look like a model?” “Better!” everyone shouts back.
If the clothes are dazzling at the fitting, they look savagely beautiful on location—in this case, a sepulchral nineteenth-century alley in Tribeca made even more Byronic with wind machines and water hoses. Stefani clatters into the trailer in her Patrick Cox shoes and pulls on the first ensemble to be shot: a coir sauvage grommet-studded Amazon ballet-dancer skirt and a pink ruched sequined-speckled chiffon top that looks like it was made for a circus aerialist. She’s going to w-ear the headdress, too, but it's deemed too big to get through the trailer door on her head, so she'll put it on in the street, where a gaggle of fans, panting with excitement and sporting cameras, is gathering. There’s a suggestion that perhaps she should wait until she’s outside before putting on the leopard-print, gladiator elf shoes, as well. “Those are so treacherous," someone in the trailer worries. But Stefani will have none of it. “I love them!” she sings out, plopping down on a stool and sliding her feet atop the platforms. “And I think they’re comfortable!”
Gwen Stefani may be glimpsed at the 2002 VH1/ Vogue Fashion Awards, to be broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall on October 15. Tune in to see if Stefani will strut off once more with a couple of meaningful "fricking things. ”