Jagger's onstage dualities were not accidental, said Durbin. "It was all deliberate."
Nowadays, of course, gender blur is a karaoke setting in the music business. At some point everyone in a band has put on eyeliner, except perhaps the girls.
And while groups as unalike as the Libertines, say, or the Scissor Sisters, or the Strokes or the Killers or the Hives, or My Chemical Romance continue to pay homage, not always ironic, to the rock star as dandified satyr, the much greater shift in the music business is away from Rolling Stones-style theatricality and toward something more neutral, amateurish and anonymous.
"We would never get all costumed up," Mitch DeRosier, a musician with the indie band Born Ruffians, said by phone last week from Portland, Oregon, where the group was on tour with Hot Chip. "I don't go out of my way that much."
Talk to a member of almost any band created in the emo era, and one would hear more or less the same thing. "I like the Rolling Stones, and I'm a huge fan of their music," said Seth Olinsky, a musician in the exuberantly frumpy Brooklyn-based indie band Akron/Family. "But the sexy-strut dude is not the image I choose to be important to me."
As an expression of style, grunge has been quoted so liberally by now that it rates a mile marker on the timeline of fashion. Yet compared with the look lately favored by young bands, grunge has come to seem almost baroque.
And as that has happened, so has Jagger's form of personal display been refined to the extent that he is like an essence of rock star: skinny jeans and cropped jackets by the Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere; tight glittering T-shirts by the Dior designer Hedi Slimane.
"In mainstream rock, you no longer see guys willing to take these fashion risks," said Dan Peres, the editor of Details, a magazine whose editorial mission basically descends from Jagger's robust sartorial and social experiments. "In this day and age, where if you have a great MySpace page you can go further than acts with labels promoting them and sell tonnes of albums without even having a label," said Peres, "no one wants to make a style statement that would alienate anyone."
No one wants to go onstage, as Jagger did each time the band played Sympathy for the Devil on the Bigger Bang tour — which ends this weekend in Vancouver — in a coat and matching fedora designed by Miuccia Prada and made entirely of feathers, perhaps because no one without his history could wear a coat of cock feathers and not seem like a joke.
"Very early on we did the same thing" young bands are now doing, Jagger explained in an interview this week. "We wore clothes very similar to what we wore offstage because we didn't have any money and that was the look."
It wasn't until the end of the 1960s, when the Rolling Stones were playing 50,000-seat arenas, that the band began, he said, to wear more "eye-catching" stuff.
"If I was starting out now, I would dress down but still hope to have some distinctive way of dressing down," he said.
"It doesn't matter if you're starting out or you're doing it for years," Jagger said. "There's no point in having a huge dress-up if you're playing a 500-seat club. And if you're playing for 50,000 people, there's no point in wearing rags."
RSS