Tina Turner: Simply the best dressed
“When I look back, I can see the story of my life through the clothes I wore,” Turner told NBC News in the US in 2020, while promoting her book That’s My Life. “The opportunity to sing with Ike in the early days was like something out of a fairytale for a teenager whose dream was to perform onstage.”
“I felt so elegant in my gown, like a princess. But that gown was a prison, just like my marriage. I wanted to move, so my skirts got shorter and less constricting because freedom was important to me, onstage and in life.”
Liberation initially came in the stage outfits designed by Bob Mackie, following her divorce from Ike. Turner wore Mackie’s yellow and red sequinned dress with a strip skirt created to resemble flames beside Cher on The Sonny and Cher Show in 1977. Versions of that dress have since been worn by Wonder Woman Lynda Carter, drag performer Ru Paul and Beyonce.
Turner moved on from Mackie in the eighties, only to return to him for her farewell tour marking her 50th anniversary in 2008. During the break from sequins she defined hard-edged eighties glamour in a denim shirt, worn with fitted black leather outfits and stilettos that showcased her constantly moving legs.
With her honey-blonde wig teased to perfection and fishnet stockings, this look from her 1985 Private Dancer tour became as recognisable as Michael Jackson’s solitary glove and early Madonna’s ra-ra skirts.
Many of the rough and ready-to-wear looks were crafted by master couturier Azzedine Alaia, who frequently worked with Turner, memorably creating a gold-beaded mini-dress and silver mesh dress that frequently tour in exhibitions dedicated to the late Tunisian-born designer.
Chain mail was cemented in her visual vocabulary after starring in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome in 1985, transforming into sequin trims in the nineties on lingerie-inspired mini-dresses that challenged age limits to sexiness.
In 2021 an NFT of a Versace mini-dress worn by Turner on tour in the nineties was auctioned at Miami’s Art Basel.
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It was an unlikely pairing, according to her former stylist Wayne Scot Lukas, who also worked with Janet Jackson. “Tina hated Versace! She was all about Armani,” he told the New York Post.
In 2011, Armani and the rest of Milan was all about Tina.
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