Prince: The greatest rock 'n' roll closet of all time

On the second floor of Paisley Park, atop the “little kitchen” and just past the elegant dovecote wherein resides Majesty and Divinity, two archivists tirelessly attend to the fashion archives of the performer formerly and forever known as Prince. Bethany Hopman and Rebecca Jordan, who hail from Pennsylvania and Maryland, respectively, spend their days preserving and cataloging the thousands of jumpsuits, trenchcoats, high-waisted trousers, silk blouses, Lurex tunics, man heels (600 pairs thus far), pendants, and pj’s that constitute one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll closets of all time. (There are four archivists in total.) Some of Prince’s most iconic looks are on display on mannequins throughout Paisley’s public areas; when we visited last winter, some were on loan to the O2. But mostly, the clothes and accessories are wrapped in acid-free tissue and are packed in boxes, kept for eternity with the original sketches attached in a nearby binder.

And there are many, many, many binders. At one time, these rooms housed Prince’s in-house atelier, a full-service tailoring shop that made virtually everything he wore at the height of his fame and certainly everything worn by him and the Revolution in live performances and on film. The designers and tailors who worked for him communicated primarily through their drawings, which were interpretations of a general brief he’d thrown out (Barbarella meets the Godfather, say), and these sketches were placed in a binder with fabric swatches for his review. He would respond with sticky notes of approval or further instruction (“let’s do these in fuchsia and black, too”; “make these charms like Mayte’s purse”), and two weeks later, the process would begin again. In the meantime, the clothes would keep coming: Nehru jackets, matador boleros, skinny-hipped pants with a smidgen of flare, asymmetrical lapels, and single-suspender onesies, all rendered in variations of four-ply silk charmeuse and dupioni (internationally sourced through mail order). There was a mannequin made in his size as Prince himself did not, as a rule, do fittings. Jim Sherrin, the talented tailor who came to Prince from Guthrie Theater in the early ’80s and made all of those definitive slender-trouser looks, never touched the artist. Helen Hiatt, the brilliant wardrobe mistress who worked on various aspects of Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Timesbefore overseeing the entire studio for Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge, remembersthat she would very occasionally be granted a fitting with Prince. “I finally said, ‘Prince, I am going to send a ruler over so that when you say one inch we know what you are talking about.’ We had to set some ground rules.”

So dig, if you will, this picture: a performer of stadium magnitude, at the apex of his career, with no stylists, no art directors, no contracts or monied deals with brands or haute couture houses, no outside consultants. Instead, he hired seamstresses and tailors, often from Minneapolis, which has a strong craft tradition and theater community, and he trusted them to interpret his rather extraordinary, gender-rules-be-damned notions in silk and lace and pearls. He would tear pages from women’s fashion magazines and let the studio interpret it for a rockin’ dude. He would say to Hiatt, “Can you write on my clothes?” And she would pick a font, get his okay, and take it to a friend’s house to be silk-screened in a basement.

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