Nina Simone explained why fashion is important to musicians
There are two schools of thought when it comes to musicians and fashion. The first believes that the two exist entirely separately and that how a person dresses dictates nothing about their sound. But as the great Nina Simone would gladly point out, this is a limited view. The second school recognises the power of style, of fine-tuning one’s image to mirror one’s work. Where would glam rock be without the glam? Would David Bowie’s music be as impactful as the avant-garde outfits? And, most crucially, would Simone feel as powerful without her gowns?
Simone was always someone who recognised her own power. A strident voice in the fight for civil rights, her style reflected her steely self-belief. She was opulent, her rich, almost androgynous vocals matched by decadent evening gowns. In a conversation with Lilian Terry, she was asked if evening gowns were her weakness, to which she replied no. It was clothes, period.
“I love clothes,” she laughed. “Yes, I do. I mean, if you come out and you look the way you want to look, you will create a mood by your very appearance before you open your mouth. Sometimes, that can be enough to get your audience exactly in the groove, where you want them.”
It recalls another one of her famous quotes, where she insisted: “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I performed – I just want them to go to pieces.” Her voice and message was undoubtedly the driver of her impact, but she understood her aesthetic power, too.
This is particularly impactful when you consider she wrote ‘Four Women’ to rally against the Eurocentric beauty standards inflicted on black women in America and how these standards are internalised by four unique women with different skin tones: “My skin is yellow / My hair is long / Between two worlds
I do belong”. Simone also explained in the autobiography I Put a Spell on You that while it also looked at the lasting legacy of slavery, the song was intended to inspire black women to reclaim their own beauty.
In her conversation with Terry, Simone recalled a time when she wore the same item over and over – entirely by design. “Last year,” she explained, “I wore the same gown for a year, everywhere I went. I wanted people to remember me, looking a certain way. It made it easier for me.”
The dress itself was all black, a crocheted fishnet jumpsuit with a flesh-coloured lining. Simone explained the effect wryly, with the assured wink of someone entirely in control of their own image. “When I came on stage, the allusion was that I was actually naked,” she said. “I loved that. It always, kind of shocked people enough that they became mine immediately.”
