JEANS AREN'T EVERYTHING Patti Smith, wearing Dior, says she loves ball gowns for “their cut, their architecture.”Enlarge This Image Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis
THAT WAS THEN Patti Smith in 1977. Some well-worn outfits “become emblematic of certain tours,” she said.
Was she trying to merge with the scenery? Ms. Smith shrugged, noncommittal. “My style says ‘Look at me, don’t look at me,’ ” she said, a hint of testiness ruffling her easy composure. “It’s, ‘I don’t care what you think.’ ”
So it was surprising to learn that her roomy gray jacket, with cuffs that unfasten at the wrist, was designed by Ann Demeulemeester, a high priestess of Parisian vanguard chic. Her jeans were Ralph Lauren, prized by Ms. Smith for their racy lines. Her boots, a gift from Johnny Depp, who wore them as the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland,” were the perfect fit, Ms. Smith exulted, “like when the magic cobbler made your shoes.”
She has a rarefied feel for that kind of evocative detail — no stray seam escaping her scrutiny. That might stun her fans, who think of Ms. Smith as a gnarly rocker, thrashing and howling soulfully on stage. But style-world insiders embrace her as a kindred spirit whose discerning eye and sensitive fashion antennas might be the envy of a veteran stylist. Ms. Smith’s look, after all, is nothing if not rehearsed.
“She is very aware of her style and she controls it,” said Ms. Demeulemeester, a longtime friend and fashion collaborator. (Ms. Smith favors the designer’s mannish white shirts, inspired by the one she wore on the cover of her debut album, “Horses.”) “It’s about being conscious of who you are and using all the strength you have to communicate that.”
Back in the public eye, if indeed she ever left it, with a best-selling memoir and a series of concerts that promise to burnish her legend, Ms. Smith is the same deft communicator — and, not less, the canny custodian of her own image. In conversation she was gracious, even genteel, giving no sign of the trash-talking provocateur who dropped explicit sexual references into magazine profiles when she was at the height of her career, and peppered her comments with expletives.
Yet from time to time, a certain flintiness took over. “The thing I’ve always liked about performing,” she said, storm clouds gathering in her eyes, “is that I decide what I want to wear, whether I want to comb my hair. No one ever told me what to do, and no one tells me now.”
At 63, she has hung on to that resolve, sloughing off layers that strike her as inauthentic or alien to the character she crafted in the ’70s, as the gangly diva of downtown punk.
“Even as a child, I knew what I didn’t want,” Ms. Smith recalled. “I didn’t want to wear red lipstick. When my mother would say, ‘You should shave your legs,’ I would ask, ‘Why?’ I didn’t understand why we had to present a different picture of ourselves to the outside world.”
A star attraction at iconic events like the final night of CBGB, the fabled Bowery club where she performed as a girl, and at a string of public outings throughout the past decade, she has cleaved to her signature style, an unlikely fusion of glamour and grit. In her raffish T-shirts and boy coats, in concert she is the anti Gaga, rejecting gaudy, serial costume changes, refusing to bend with every shift in fashion’s wind.
That constancy has made Ms. Smith a trendsetter for several generations — how many young girls emulate her look of pegged jeans, boyfriend jackets and white shirts without ever realizing it? And her style resonates with designers as diverse as Christophe Decarnin of Balmain and Limi Yamamoto of Limi Feu, for whom Ms. Smith has been a kind of spiritual muse. “The capacity to accept anything that happens to her,” Ms. Yamamoto said recently, is a source of constant inspiration.
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