After 50 years of sweating, screaming, and singing with the Stones, Mick Jagger is all about feeling good on stage. “Men aren’t interested in clothes that look amazing but are fantastically uncomfortable to wear. We’re not into pain—we’re into comfort,” he told WWD today. The dapper duds his girlfriend, fashion designer L’Wren Scott, created for his current “50 and Counting” tour apparently fit the bill. But all one has to do is look at the Stones’ old tour photos to know that, in his earlier years, Jagger’s comfort was the exception, rather than the rule.
In the late sixties, Jagger, along with his then wife Bianca, became big-time clients of Ossie Clark, the It designer of London’s swinging sixties. Clark, who also counted the likes of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton among his fans, designed jumpsuits that hugged Mick, very, very tightly, in all the right places. From a bedazzled blue velvet onesie to a low-cut unitard, to the lace-up number pictured above (which is currently up for auction at Christie’s with a starting bid of $12,744), Jagger shied away from neither glamour nor flamboyance. Rather, as he wiggled and kicked about on stage in his Clark designs, he embraced them. Which would explain why he quite literally wore his second-skin suits to death. “You can see the pelvic wear and tear from all the gyrating,” V&A curator Kate Dorney told the Guardian in 2009 when asked about one of the rock star’s Ossie-designed costumes featured in an exhibition. However, Jagger never fell victim to the “wardrobe malfunctions” so common in modern stardom. Being the master that he was, Clark always made sure Mick was equipped with well-made backups.
—Katharine K. Zarrella
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