Dolly Parton performs in 1969. ‘They wanted to flatten my hair. They wanted me to look more chic … I hated everything about it.’ Photograph: Richard E Aaron/Redferns View image in fullscreen Dolly Parton performs in 1969. ‘They wanted to flatten my hair. They wanted me to look more chic … I hated everything about it.’ Photograph: Richard E Aaron/Redferns Dolly Parton Dolly Parton’s flamboyant, fun style: ‘I’m not a fashion icon; I’m an eyesore’ With her gaudy rhinestones and ever mushrooming hair, the country star pioneered a new vision of femininity
Dolly Parton, country star, actor and philanthropist, dies aged 80
Parton’s peerless career turned country music cliches inside out
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Hannah Marriott Wed 26 Aug 2026 09.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 26 Aug 2026 09.01 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google Dolly Parton ’s voluminous hair and rhinestone-festooned outfits were so essential to her fame that her quips about her appearance have become almost as well-known as her lyrics.
“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” is perhaps her most memorable quotation, and is typical of the self-depreciating wit she employed to talk about her appearance.
She wrote about her style in her songs, too, from her 1967 hit Dumb Blonde to 2008’s Backwoods Barbie, though in reality there was nothing cheap, or dumb, about her image. With huge blond status wigs – Tennessee by way of the court of Versailles – a fondness for glitter and high heels and tightly cut clothes that showed off her exaggerated proportions, she made herself as recognizable as Coca-Cola while employing and subverting the tropes of femininity and of country music.
View image in fullscreen Dolly Parton performs in 1976. Photograph: David Redfern/Redferns Parton never failed to poke fun at her own appearance. Her hair was a “fire hazard”, she would say, or “I’m not a fashion icon; I’m an eyesore” – but her look was highly deliberate. Never once did she waver from the aesthetic she described to Allure in 2020 as “gaudy, flamboyant, fun, comfortable – for me – noticeable”.
Parton grew up in poverty , in rural Sevier county, Tennessee, one of 12 children. One of her most moving songs – Coat of Many Colors – recalled that experience through her memory of the clothing her mother made for her from scraps.
She often said she modeled her look on a woman others called the “town tramp”, but who held a glamorous appeal for Parton, being one of the few women she saw who wasn’t mired in childcare and housework. She was “flamboyant”, Parton told the Guardian : “She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’”
View image in fullscreen Dolly Parton in 1975. Photograph: Everett/Shutterstock Parton’s sharecropper father and preacher grandfather hated the way Dolly looked, and she was punished for it. In her 2023 book , Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, she wrote that her appearance was a bone of contention at the beginning of her career too. When she got her first record deal, Fred Foster, the boss of Monument Records, wanted “to change my style into a 1960s pop look”. “They wanted to flatten my hair. They wanted me to look more chic and wear more streamlined clothes. I…