AL BANE When I styled a band I wanted everybody to have an individual look, right? But I wanted them all to kind of look “in character,” if you will. So I would suggest that they imagine a fireman, a policeman, and a paramedic standing side by side. They all look like they’re in uniform when they’re in official capacity, but they don’t all look like a squad of police officers. We would start with that kind of conversation and then I would say, “What is it that you want to present?”
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN For the baby bands, I mean a lot of them, even if they wanted to have a say, they didn’t really have a say. But then from my standpoint, whatever their visual representation is has to be organic; it can’t be something inauthentic. So for me the challenge sometimes was, “Okay, how are we gonna get you to look your very best and also be the most marketable, so I’m making the label and management happy but it’s also gonna be authentic to you, the artist?”
RAY BROWN (costume designer) I don’t like to call myself a designer … even though I am one. To me, the most important thing is if someone can create music they also have an idea of how they want to look onstage. It’s not up to me to tell them how to dress. It’s up to them to tell me how they want to dress, or how they see themselves onstage. And then I go ahead and translate what they’ve told me, no matter how, you know, incomprehensible it is.
FLEUR THIEMEYER (costume designer) You do sketches, you do variations, and you show them things and you start educating them. I sat and talked with Nikki about the look he wanted for Shout at the Devil and I said, “You mean like Vikings or Genghis Khan?” And Nikki goes, “Who’s Genghis Khan?” So you start introducing them to things they may not have crossed.
LITA FORD I was living with Nikki Sixx at that time and I had him cut my hair. He chopped it off. I loved it, because my hair drove me nuts. It was so long, and it was so silky straight, and it was getting in the way of everything. He just gave me the Mötley Crüe haircut. I had to get away from that teenage girl, long pretty hair and tennis shoes thing I had in the Runaways. I grew into being a young woman. I wanted to attract attention as well as play guitar. I wore clothes that made people’s jaws drop at that time. You put on a leather G-string and some boots up to your knees, and people are going to go, “Oh my god. Is this girl for real? Does she sleep upside down to make her hair a mess?”
RAY BROWN For Theatre of Pain I specifically remember Nikki saying that he wanted a black-and-white striped jumpsuit like he had seen Steven Tyler wearing. I convinced him that we should change it up to where it was like a two-piece thing with a longer jacket that kind of had all these points on the bottom of it. And it just evolved from there.
NEIL ZLOZOWER I shot the photos for Theatre of Pain and I thought it was like circus clothes. It looked like they were getting ready for Barnum & Bailey. Honestly, the clothes for Shout at the Devil, that was like Mad Max, Road Warrior shit. I mean, that was badass stuff.
FLEUR THIEMEYER When they were doing Shout at the Devil I lived on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica and I said to the guys, “Come down to my place.” I ran a whole lot of basic sketches off on a copy machine, just black and whites. I gave them, I think, four sketches each. They sat on the floor of my apartment with colored pencils and I said, “Color it the way you see it.” Nikki did black and red because he wanted the power of blood. Mick Mars, his thing was blue, more somber. He really was this quiet one that sort of sat back and watched these other three monkeys perform.
RAY BROWN Vince Neil, in that same Theatre of Pain era, he had a pair of pink-and-white very see-through almost lacy pants that I made for him. He put them on and one of the other guys, I’m not sure which one, said, “Dude, you look like a fuckin’ chick! Why don’t you just put on a garter belt as well?” And we all looked at each other like, “Oh, that’s a good idea, innit?” That was five years before Gaultier did it for Madonna.
NIKKI SIXX We were just rebelling against the fact that there were all these bad bands coming out of L.A. who were copping our look. There were all these awful new bands and we thought, Man, we’re not responsible for this, are we? Well, let’s change and totally throw a wrench in the thing. Let’s dress in pink! I don’t think that glam had ever really been embraced like that before.
AL BANE With Warrant we kind of built a cleaner sleazy look, if you will. Back then Poison was out there. L.A. Guns and Pretty Boy Floyd, all these bands were kind of competing against each other. And here comes Warrant. So what can we do? Well, we didn’t do much different from what everybody else was doing—we just applied ourselves a little bit.
JOEY ALLEN Al Bane made all the really cool buckle-y stuff that Jani used to wear. In fact, he made the Bad jacket for Michael Jackson. And he pretty much, in my eyes, I mean you’d have to ask Al Bane, but he ripped that off from Jani.
AL BANE I gotta rewind the story a little bit. One day I get a phone call at my mom’s house—“They’re gonna send a car to come pick you up.” I’m twenty, twenty-one years old, whatever. This limo pulls up, I get in, and we drive over to Universal Studios. They frisk me and we walk into this room. And way on the other end of this room is a stage. You can hear sound, there’s lighting going on, it’s a dress rehearsal. I have no idea for who. They make me wait in this little area and then these people drive up in little golf carts. I recognize one guy, it’s Quincy Jones. And this guy in a robe, with a hood over his head, it’s clear he’s just gotten off the stage. They put him on a sitting pedestal, it looks like a wedding cake. Then they bring me up to approach the guy, and he pulls his hood off and it’s freaking Michael Jackson! I’m looking at him going, “Oh my god.” Then Michael Jackson reaches into his pocket and he brings out a crumpled-up Warrant flyer. And he goes [in high voice] “Are you Al Bane, the man with the leather?”
So Michael Jackson copied Warrant’s look for Bad. Go look at the cover—the black cotton jacket with a bunch of belt buckles on it. Only with Warrant it was a cheap pin-star concho belt buckle thing instead of custom-made rhinestones, you know what I mean? It’s Michael Jackson versus unsigned Warrant.
JOEY ALLEN So then we graduated to Heidi Richman.
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN I remember we sat down for our first creative meeting, just me and the band. I said, “Hey, I have this idea, what do you think?” And they were like, “Well, we have this idea, what do you think?” And we both said, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to do all white leather and then have each guy’s particular outfit really be a reflection of who and what they are?”
JOEY ALLEN To be honest with you I don’t remember whose idea it was to wear [the outfits in the “Heaven” video]. All’s I know is that they were leather, and to me it doesn’t matter what color it is. If it’s leather, it’s leather. It smells like leather, it moves like leather. So to have white leather outfits with black on them, we didn’t say to ourselves, “Wow, this is gonna be a Versace moment.” You don’t think anything but, It’s leather, it’s rock ’n’ roll, it’s a ballad, it’s about heaven. Let’s wear white. In retrospect maybe it wasn’t a great idea. Who knows?
FLEUR THIEMEYER There was a fabric, I can’t remember the name of it, but it came out of Japan and I think Ray Brown is probably the first person to use it. It looked like leather, it had the qualities of leather, but it was fully washable.
RAY BROWN It was a simulated leather but it was the best simulated leather I’d ever seen. And it was really expensive. I bought some of it and it just worked amazing. You could wash it in a washing machine, dry it in a dryer. All the pants I did for Guns N’ Roses apart from Slash’s were all out of that washable leather.
AL BANE One thing that happened with Michael Jackson was that after he pulled out that Warrant flyer, somebody says, “Go get the TV.” They roll in a big 1970s TV on a fucking cart, like in your junior high school, they put a videotape in the VCR and … there’s Warrant onstage! And Michael says, “They jump around like circus performers, and they can do it every day. Where my stuff is falling apart during one dress rehearsal.” Michael goes through a half a song and the crotch is blown out on his pants. Meanwhile, the Warrant guys are doing everything they do and the pants are holding up every night. So what’s the difference? Why can’t Michael Jackson’s clothes stay together and Warrant’s did?
FLEUR THIEMEYER You put these people onstage, it’s like you’ve put an electric shock through them. They just go ballistic. So the spandex or anything that had stretch in it, it allowed them to continue into this euphoric state of mind and not have to worry about, Oh, but what if I split them all?
KLAUS MEINE (singer, Scorpions) Those spandex, they were so comfortable! You could move around like crazy, which we did. You can move your little legs because it was so easy. It felt so good, you know?
STEVE BROWN (guitarist, Trixter) We recorded our first record next to where the Scorpions were making theirs, so we would see them every day. They would roll up in a van and they would be dressed in their stage clothes. Leather. They would wear leather pants to the studio. I would say, “How fucking crazy?” We were wearing, like, shorts and baseball hats.
FLEUR THIEMEYER We started making spandex for David Lee Roth because he did so many karate moves and high kicks and everything. And if something was to split or break, he would just lose it. You know, he would really … “What the hell!” That sort of shit. And so once this fabric was there and they could do things without any sort of being impeded in any way, you know, it gave them such a freedom onstage. If they wanted to do the splits they could.
RAY BROWN I remember Jon Bon Jovi and I sitting down and having a conversation about lace-front pants. And it was about, you know, if you go on tour and you gain or lose a little bit of weight, which can happen depending on what’s going on, you can just adjust the front of them. And it got to the point where every hair band I could think of was calling up going, “I want some of those lace-front pants!”
LITA FORD Here’s the story behind the torn jeans I wore in the “Kiss Me Deadly” and “Close My Eyes Forever” videos: I had been at Lemmy from Motörhead’s house for three days. I was fucked up. I called my friend Patty and said, “Come and get me. There’s no way I can drive.” She picked me up, and we’re driving down a side street. There was this electrician kid working on a telephone pole. I looked at his pants, and a little bell went off over my head. “I’ve got to have these pants.” They were naturally shredded all the way down the front from him climbing the telephone poles. I said, “Dude, I’ll give you a hundred bucks for those pants.” He looks down at them, and he goes, “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” I said, “No, man.” I said, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for them.” He goes to his car. He slips on a pair of shorts, and he goes, “I’ve got another pair at home. I live right around the corner. Do you want them, too?” I said, “Sure, I’ll take them both.”
I gave him two hundred bucks, and I got my first two pairs of holey jeans, which I took to Fleur Thiemeyer. She tricked them out by putting little pieces of leather and beads and stuff on the inside and stuff on the outside. My mother hated them. She goes, “Get in the house.” I said, “Why, Mom?” “Just get in the house. I don’t want the neighbors to see you in those jeans.” Little did she know, they’d be all over MTV.
FRANKIE BANALI I can tell you for me personally, the tights came about because if you were traveling out on the road, you could wear them and then you could go back to your hotel room, stick ’em in the sink, water, Woolite, squeeze ’em out, and they’d be dry the next morning. It was out of necessity, not design.
FLEUR THIEMEYER David Lee Roth had all the argyle spandex pants—they’d be, like, red and white or red and black with stripes and all that. And one time his concept was he wanted me to make the same pants and a shirt for a monkey. So they came over to a studio I had on Santa Monica Boulevard. Now, the monkey standing up at full height would probably be a good three, three and a half feet tall. This wasn’t a little monkey. So I get down on the floor and he’s patting me on the head and I take a tape measure to try to get this monkey’s inseam from underneath. From his scrotum, so to speak, to the floor. But every time I put my hand anywhere near that area, the monkey would grab my hand and throw it away. He got really pissed off. And Dave was just in hysterics.
DAVID LEE ROTH Pushing boundaries in terms of what [Van Halen] wore was never an ambition of ours, but it always seemed to be where we would end up.
FLEUR THIEMEYER I think the monkey got so upset he shit on the floor. So, you know, we ended up moving on.
SHARON OSBOURNE I’d used Fleur to do the clothes for Electric Light Orchestra. And then she did Ozzy.
FLEUR THIEMEYER Sharon realized that Ozzy’s career needed a reboot. It needed to be different from Black Sabbath. But if you look at that album [1986’s The Ultimate Sin], how much more commercial it is, you look at the “Shot in the Dark” video, it was very much a look of the time on MTV.
OZZY OSBOURNE People were saying I looked very camp and I did. I look back now and I go, “What the fuck was I thinking?” But it was what everyone was doing.
FLEUR THIEMEYER We used to laugh and say they were his Diana Ross gowns.
SHARON OSBOURNE It was all insanity. It was like Liberace.
FLEUR THIEMEYER Well, the funny thing is we used a place called the Design Studio in L.A. and they used to make Elvis’ stuff and Liberace’s stuff. The pattern we used for Ozzy’s cape was from Liberace’s cape.
SHARON OSBOURNE Looking back at it, Ozzy goes, “I never wore that.” I’m like, “That’s you in the fucking photo!” And he goes, “Thank god I was stoned.”
GEORGE LYNCH Back then everybody used Ray Brown to make their clothes and style them. So we all wore the same outfits. Everybody from Mötley Crüe to Scorpions to Ratt to Dokken on down the line. Every single band. We all wore Ray Brown clothes. So we all kind of looked the same.
RAY BROWN What was the Dokken album where they had all that crazy clothing on the cover? Under Lock and Key? That was all mine. They really got a lot of flak about that.
MARK WEISS I’m the one that shot the photos. I think when they first saw ’em they were going, “What the fuck is this?”
DON DOKKEN You look at the album cover of Under Lock and Key, we’re wearing these ridiculous outfits. I’m in blue! And Jeff’s in red! And Mick’s in purple! And George will be mauve! It’s like, “Oh, fuck.” And we spent a fortune on those clothes.
RAY BROWN I don’t even remember how those designs came up. It was just a bunch of sketches that we had of these kind of weirdly shaped jackets. A little bit influenced possibly by the Duran Duran look, which was going on at the same time but on the other side of the world. But more flamboyant. And they said, “Yeah.” They went for it.
“WILD” MICK BROWN Cliff Burnstein used to go, “God, why don’t you guys just wear what you wear on the street? Because when you show up to do the videos that’s when you look cool. And then they put you in all that crap, you’ve got so much makeup on and tiger spandex…” He hated all that shit.
CLIFF BURNSTEIN They were musicians, those guys. Lynch was an exceptional musician. But they were so part of that L.A. scene and it was so de rigueur to look like that and dress up like that. You know, it’s hard to go against the grain.
“WILD” MICK BROWN We thought, No, you gotta do this. Gotta put more makeup on. And Burnstein would just go, “Fuck, I don’t get it.” But that’s what was going on. And then we realized, “We can’t keep up with this.” Because as soon as your hair’s big and you have enough makeup on, well, then that Ratt band comes out and they’ve got ten times more makeup! And then Mötley Crüe takes it to a whole new level, which was brilliant. And it’s like, “Okay, how am I gonna win this one?”
EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA With Twisted it was almost like they prejudged you. It’s like getting stereotyped or profiled—because you wear makeup you can’t be good. You can’t be serious players or have serious music.
DEE SNIDER At one point we did the “Have It Your Way” press kit, which was a picture of us with makeup and a picture of us without makeup. We were basically saying, “If this is a sticking point, sign us and we’ll just be a denim-and-leather rock band.”
EDDIE “FINGERS” OJEDA But I think it definitely helped us because it made it look like more of a show. It wasn’t just a bunch of guys going up there in T-shirts and jeans rocking out, and I think that gave the audience more of a thrill. It turned into war paint after a while. It wasn’t even glam.
FRANK HANNON (guitarist, Tesla) As far as Tesla goes, we were just wearing jeans and T-shirts and stuff. There were publicists and video directors that tried to doll us up a little bit and bring in makeup artists and stuff like that on a couple of our early videos, but it never really felt comfortable to us. In some ways we felt that, you know, being normal stopped us from getting on the covers of magazines. It was a little frustrating, but it didn’t come natural to us to wear lipstick and pink spandex and stuff like that.
REB BEACH We always wanted to wear all the flashy clothes and pouf up our hair like everybody else. I remember having no money and being on welfare and watching MTV and seeing Britny Fox and going, “I can do that!”
“DIZZY” DEAN DAVIDSON For Britny Fox, I looked at the old Who. Remember the Who when they were in the ’60s? With the ruffles? It was like the early Who, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Prince. It was more of a mod look and I ran with it.
BILLY CHILDS In the early days we had girls make the outfits for us who would do it for free. Dean had a sister that was invaluable to helping us out and making this shit work. ’Cause how do you dress like a Victorian-era dude? I don’t know, you know? Oddly enough, it’s actually more Edwardian than Victorian. But that’s a whole ’nother story …
JEFF LABAR Poison took it way further than anyone else. And they were gorgeous. I mean, seriously, the first time I saw the album cover [for Look What the Cat Dragged In] I was like, “Holy shit! These chicks are hot!” I think Cinderella did pretty much the same thing with the makeup and hair. We were just not as pretty.
NEIL ZLOZOWER Those bands, they were pretty boys. But there was no shortage of girls. I mean, you gotta understand, I used to always go out with the bad boys—Van Halen, Mötley, Poison, Ratt, Guns N’ Roses. Those were the bands I liked hanging with, and every night there were billions of fucking girls that wanted to bone the guys.
FLEUR THIEMEYER The sexuality needed to appeal to both male and female in the audience, you know? Vince Neil, the girls were all over him like a rash. But the way he threw himself, the guys thought he was cool, too. It’s very much a fine line. Because you don’t want to look like a drag queen.
NEIL ZLOZOWER The prettier they looked at these photo shoots, the more chicks they had at the shows.
DON DOKKEN The Sunset Strip? I mean, the hair, the makeup, the spandex … you couldn’t tell the chicks from the dudes.
TRACII GUNS None of the guys on the Strip were prettier than the girls. Except maybe [Enuff Z’Nuff drummer] Vikki Foxx. But he was from Chicago.
STEVIE RACHELLE When I first got to L.A. I went to Cherie Adams’ Hair Magic on Robertson Boulevard. Michael [Lean, Tuff drummer] got me hair extensions. That was a necessary … my hair was like Leif Garrett’s. It was barely to my shoulders. But a lot of guys went there. If you look there’s old advertisements—I wanna say her ad was something like “Hair Extensions to the Stars.”
DAVID COVERDALE (singer, Whitesnake) My hair in the “Still of the Night” video was actually a hairdressing accident. In those days it was a chemical rinse. I got it from [video director] Marty Callner’s wife, Eliza, a stunningly beautiful woman. Just gorgeous. I said, “Do whatever you fucking want, baby.” You know? So the day before the video shoot, I’d gone to Eliza to get a couple of highlights … and came out looking like a fucking beach boy! I said, “Put it back.” And she said, “I can’t—your hair will drop out.” Because it was that kind of chemical shit. I went, “Ah, for fuck’s sake.” So I drove the old white Jag back to the Mondrian Hotel [in L.A.], where everybody—everybody—without exception went, “Oh my god, you look amazing!”
JAMES LOMENZO Mike Tramp took me to perm my hair, blond it up a little bit. It reminded me of one of those Twilight Zone episodes, because from my perspective after they processed my hair and washed it out, I had three heads come into my view and look at my head after they’d taken all the wrappings off. And one of them said to the other, “Yeah, that should loosen up in a few days.” If you want to know what that means, take a look at the photo inside the White Lion Pride album cover and you’ll see.
MIKE TRAMP I enjoyed dressing up onstage and I enjoyed having the long hair, but White Lion was a New York band from Italian families, and it’s not who we were. But I ended up having a girlfriend of many years who was one of the biggest designers during the ’80s for the biggest bands and stuff like that, and we had a lot of fun making these clothes …
FLEUR THIEMEYER I was married to Mike Tramp. And Michael had the stage presence, the character, the looks. He could wear anything, he could support it in his manner and in his physical abilities. But for a very, very, very long time, I did not tell people we were in a relationship, because then at certain times it comes out and they go, “Oh, yeah, just ’cause he’s your boyfriend he gets everything.” And it’s like, “Oh, come on, please…” You start getting a bit of spitefulness coming out of people, and they’ve already got jealousy because, you know, the band’s got a number two single on Billboard with “When the Children Cry.”
ZAKK WYLDE I was sleeping with my hairdresser, who’s now my wife. I still bang her whenever I get the opportunity, when the kids aren’t rollin’ around the house.
RIKKI ROCKETT Rock ’n’ roll, like David Lee Roth said, “it’s always been about haircuts and shoes.” We were the next haircuts and shoes for a while.
NEIL ZLOZOWER I mean, honestly, you have a year and a half, two years between when the first Poison record came out and then Guns really sort of took off. All of a sudden the hairspray started coming down and all that shit.
FLEUR THIEMEYER Skid Row probably was the closest to a band that was not over-the-top in dress. But you had Sebastian, so, you know …
SCOTTI HILL Our first photo shoot in 1986, with Mark Weiss—very glam. It was just like, whatever was laying around. And lots of ripped-up denim.
RACHEL BOLAN I’ll never forget, we were all sitting looking at the Polaroids at my parents’ house. The phone rings and I pick it up. And I just hear, “Hey asshole!” I’m like, “Who the fuck is this?” And the voice says, “It’s your worst fucking nightmare. What the fuck do you guys think you’re doin’, dressing like a bunch of chicks?” And I say again, “Who the fuck is this?” And it was Jon Bon Jovi. And he goes off on me. I’m paraphrasing but it was something like, “‘Youth Gone Wild’? It’s more like ‘Chicks Gone Wild.’” Or something to that effect. He tore me a new asshole on the phone.
SCOTTI HILL I think from that day on everybody wanted to photograph us in front of a brick wall. At some point it was like, “No more brick walls!”
RAY BROWN I mean, when you look back on it, it was really, really fun … as long as you didn’t think too much about what it was you were making. Some of the stuff was just nutty. You know that Alice Cooper jacket that had all the nails sticking out of it? When I shipped it to him, the FedEx guy cut his hands because the nails came right through the box.
FLEUR THIEMEYER At any given time, I could have four or five bands on the road, five people in each band, managers, labels … I could have forty people calling me every single day wanting this or wanting that. So it was just this nonstop production line and flying and traveling. You’re trying to keep up, but you’re also trying to come up with new scenes and new ideas. But the funny thing is they all wanted to be the same thing. They thought if they looked like Guns N’ Roses, they would be as successful. But the singer isn’t Axl Rose and the guitarist isn’t Slash. I mean, there’s a reason why these bands were successful, and why they sold ten million records compared to three.
HEIDI MARGOT RICHMAN Think of all the bands that were hopping in a van and flooding into L.A. and hooking up with a stripper so they had a place to live and try and figure it out. It was a massive ecosystem. And these guys, they were the ones who a lot of times would seek me out because they’re like, “Oh, we want to look like Warrant,” or “We want to be as glam as this, as hard as that.”
RON KEEL Fashion killed us all. Because by ’87 you had one guy, Ray Brown—great guy, fantastic talent. But he’s making clothes for Mötley Crüe, Judas Priest, Keel … every band in the business was dressing up in Ray Brown costumes. So of course every band starts to look kind of similar. If you come from another planet and you look at Judas Priest and Warrant, you wouldn’t know the difference ’cause they’re all wearing Ray Brown clothes! So the fashion certainly got in the way. You can’t build a lasting foundation on clothes and hair!
RAY BROWN Was there anything I thought was particularly outrageous? Well, if you look at the clothing, it’s all pretty outrageous, innit?
JOEY ALLEN I think my white leather stuff’s hanging up in a Hard Rock in Mexico somewhere.