How Keith Richards’ sartorial ways ‘really pissed off’ Charlie Watts
Legit, is there a better time for men’s fashion than the 1960s? Most of the time, men’s fashion seems to extend to taking something mono-coloured and featureless, then giving it the most shapeless, functional tailoring possible. Then you look at what the likes of Charlie Watts and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones were wearing, seemingly in their private lives as well as on stage, and weep for what might have been.
The Stones, in particular, are deservedly fashion icons. If anything, the aesthetics of what constitutes “a rock ‘n’ roll band” trace back to them more times than anyone else. Not Elvis, not Bob Marley, not even The Fabs themselves. They might have started out life with the same dark suits and shaggy hair that their Scouse rivals made famous but, as with basically everything else about The Stones, they took what The Beatles were doing and made it edgier and more dangerous.
By the mid-1960s, when ‘Swinging London’ was in full flow and the first hints of the hippy movement were beginning to influence pop culture, The Rolling Stones were basically the coolest men on the planet. This was despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that there wasn’t any real cohesion between the bandmates. Everyone had their own distinct style.
Mick Jagger had his simple, almost casual designs occasionally augmented with flashes of colour. Brian Jones was easily the hippiest of The Stones, his style becoming more flamboyant and dandy-esque as time went on. However, the two Stones most known for their looks are the ones with the least in common with each other: Keith Richards and Charlie Watts.
What separated Keith Richards and Charlie Watts’ style?
Of the whole band, Richards was known as the cool one with the best looks. For proof of this, look at any photo of the man ever taken outside of the 1980s. In the 1960s, though, this wasn’t really because of his own volition, but his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg’s. While this does make sense, Pallenberg was one of the best-dressed, coolest people in the world at the time, Richards wasn’t being dressed or styled by his missus in the traditional sense either.
As Richards talked about in his autobiography Life, he was just helping himself to her wardrobe. “I was beginning to wear her clothes most of the time,” he says, adding, “I would wake up and put on what was lying around. Sometimes it was mine, and sometimes it was the old lady’s, but we were the same size, so it didn’t matter. If I sleep with someone, I at least have the right to wear her clothes.”
While Watts was never far behind his guitarist in terms of cool factor, the fact that Keef was known for his togs and Charlie wasn’t drove him mad. As Richards went on to say in Life, “It really pissed off Charlie Watts, with his walk-in cupboards of impeccable Saville Row suits, that I started to become a fashion icon for wearing my old lady’s clothes.”
Hopefully, he realised that the heart of The Rolling Stones’ cool came from that blend of styles. Above all, though, let’s hope he knew that just because people knew that Keith Richards is cool doesn’t mean that those same people didn’t believe that Charlie Watts was cool as well. A very different kind of cool, perhaps, but one that was just as unforgettable.
