My in-the-know friend LCP recently forwarded me a link to an amazing photo gallery that I can’t get out of my mind: an installment in a killer irregular fashion feature on the website of the Australian magazine Oyster called “Street Style Before Street Style,” devoted to the one, the only Stevie Nicks. I’ve posted two of the images here; the rest can be found by clicking here.
Stevie, who for the uninitiated (to image!), is the one-time Fleewood Mac chanteuse/tambourine shimmier who went solo in the early ’80s. As a result, her Belladonna album was a constant at junior high and high school parties in Cleveland, Tennessee, and beyond, thanks to tracks like “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around and “Edge of Seventeen” – seventeen, of course, being the age that every 12-year-old spinning that LP (!) on their dinky little record players back then wished so desperately to be.
Of course, that day came soon enough – and passed just as quickly. Still, as badly as I’ve always wanted to be like and dress as cool as Stevie, in the thirty years since I first heard “Leather and Lace,” I’ve never come close – perhaps save for the night a few years ago when I wore a purple maxi dress and blonde permed wig and tied a stuffed white cockatiel to my hand to cop her look for a “come as your favorite album cover” party. Regardless, I still can’t get enough of Stevie’s voice or her amazing style – a groovy-witchy mix of drippy velvet dresses, gauzy blouses, Victorian top hats, halter tops, sailor-style denim pants, patchwork calico skirts, and pretty much any other hippie-tastic styles you can think of, that I still try to look to for inspiration when I survey my closet every morning.
Rock on, white magic woman. Thanks for the inspiration.
-Libby
