Spinning Around … Minogue in her famous gold hot pants. Photograph: Channel 5 View image in fullscreen Spinning Around … Minogue in her famous gold hot pants. Photograph: Channel 5 Fashion From 50p gold hot pants to Paul Smith suits: how Kylie Minogue became one of pop’s ultimate chameleons The star’s rise from Ramsay Street to global superstar is the subject of a new book. It’s a journey that has cleverly harnessed the power of fashion to transform, subvert – and shock
Michael Cragg Wed 23 Sep 2026 08.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 23 Sep 2026 08.06 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google O n 20 December 1989, Kylie Minogue first harnessed the power of fashion. Attending the Australian premiere of her film The Delinquents, she wore a custom sequined noughts-and-crosses minidress by Australian designers Morrissey Edmiston and a cropped blond wig. She also arrived with a new accessory: a rock star boyfriend in the shape of Michael Hutchence from INXS.
Before then, there’d been her Neighbours character Charlene’s peak-80s silk taffeta and lace wedding dress, and Kylie the pop star on the cover of her first album, in 1988, wearing a topless hat showing off cascading curls. But that had been fashion forced on her, at a time when she had no say in her image.
View image in fullscreen Breakout moment … with Michael Hutchence at the premiere of The Delinquents. Photograph: Mick Hutson/Redferns From that moment, Kylie, or the public-facing version at least, took control. She used fashion as a reflection of her desire and need to evolve. Forever the pop chameleon, she anchored each new era via deliberate fashion choices that communicated where she was at in her life and career. As Jean Paul Gaultier wrote in the foreword to her 2012 photo-book Kylie/Fashion: “You change, you transform yourself, you adapt with the evolution of times, fashions, desires … and still stay yourself.”
View image in fullscreen Especially for you … in that wedding dress with Jason Donovan in Neighbours. Photograph: Fremantle Ltd/Rex While shapeshifting and defining distinct eras via fashion is a classic pop star move, Kylie’s early evolutions had to be more extreme. Madonna – the queen of reinvention, whose influence can be traced to Lady Gaga and Addison Rae – arrived fresh from the streets of New York and a friendship group that included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Her 80s look of fishnets, gloves and copious amounts of bangles felt cool. The wide-eyed Kylie, meanwhile, had to take bigger risks; she had to shake off Neighbours, Jason Donovan and the sense of playing dress-up in a box marked “cringe”.
This need manifested itself in her 1991 Let’s Get to It tour. The singer, keen to bury her Smiley Kylie persona, turned to the then relatively unknown John Galliano. “I just love dressing up and anyone who enjoys dressing up,” said Galliano at the time . The looks included corsets, stockings and suspenders and, most controversially, revealing underwear that showed off her buttocks. It created a tabloid scandal. NME accused Kylie of sending out a “dangerous message” to her young fans, which was sort of the point. She was using fashion to signal a move away from the old version of herself. “Those outfits weren’t a mistake,” she told Big! magazine that year. “I didn’t employ John Galliano to make me neck-to-toe cover-ups.”
By the early 90s, Kylie had become a mainstay on the covers of style magazines such as the Face and i-D. For the latter she worked with fash…