100 Things Elvis Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Gillian G. Gaar

Author:Gillian G. Gaar [Gaar, Gillian G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2014-02-22T22:00:00+00:00

50. All That Glitters

Though he didn’t actually wear it that many times, the gold suit Elvis had designed in 1957 became one of his most famous outfits.

The suit was designed by Nudie Cohn, “Rodeo Tailor to the Stars.” Nudie was born Nuta Kotlyarenko in 1902 in Kiev and emigrated to the U.S., growing up in Brooklyn. His first shop, Nudie’s for the Ladies, was located in New York City and catered to strippers and showgirls. In the 1940s, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he began designing clothes with a Western look, and opened a new shop, Nudie’s of Hollywood (when the shop later moved, it was renamed Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors). He was soon designing clothes for a variety of country & western entertainers, finally capturing mainstream attention when he began designing outfits for Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Nudie’s clothes were known for their flamboyance; his website claims he was the first man to put rhinestones on clothing.

Elvis’ manager gave Nudie a commission to design an especially extravagant outfit for Elvis, and he certainly succeeded. The shimmering gold outfit (generally said to be gold lame, though some accounts say it was gold leaf) had silver trim and rhinestones around the collar, cuffs, and pockets; a rhinestone “stripe” also ran down the outside pant leg. A single button held the jacket closed in front. There was a matching frilly shirt, a gold Western-style tie, and gold shoes. The cost of the outfit was said to be $10,000, but that turned out to be PR hyperbole; the actual cost was $2,500.

It was quite a glittering creation. But Elvis never really took to it. He first wore the suit for a show in Chicago on March 28, 1957, but after wearing it the next night at a show in St. Louis, he largely stuck to wearing the jacket with black dress pants. “After a while he came to be embarrassed by [the suit],” Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick wrote. “It was as if he were advertising the suit than the other way around.”

But he wore the full suit for the cover of 50,000,000 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong: Elvis’ Gold Records Vol. 2, released in November 1959, which is where most people saw the outfit. The album’s cover concept, which featured multiple images of Elvis wearing the suit, has been copied by other artists, included Rod Stewart, The Fall, and Bon Jovi.

Elvis never wore the full suit again after 1957. He last wore the jacket in public on March 25, 1961, at a performance in Honolulu. And when Bill Belew designed a similar-looking suit for Elvis to wear during his Comeback Special, he balked, telling the designer, “Billy, I have to be honest with you. I always hated that suit, and I will not wear it.” Belew was surprised but eventually hit upon the solution Elvis had used, simply designing a gold jacket to be worn with black dress pants. “It was a way of rebelling against the Colonel,” Belew told me, explaining Elvis’ dislike of the suit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.