The Truth About Dolly Parton’s Style

Dolly Parton was just 5-foot-nothing tall. She needed platform heels to make her feel that she could fill a performance space. Her husband, Carl Dean, once told her that from the audience, her platinum wigs made her tiny figure look like a Q-tip. But no amount of mocking could make her surrender the hair, heels, and rhinestones, which were her own brand of feminism under wraps. “Believe it or not, I had to fight for that look!” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, Behind the Seams. The look wasn’t about showbiz. It was about sovereignty. And it must have been more than passingly rewarding for Parton to know that her audience finally understood this about her before she died, at the age of 80—to know that she was fully appreciated for the wallop of woman she was. She had so much guts, smarts, and self-ownership beneath the taffetized country-music artifice that sold more than 100 million records. There was no hint of glamour in the Tennessee hill country where Parton grew up, just unadorned, worn-out women like her mother, who’d married at 15 and had a dozen children by the age of 35. Parton’s first dresses were made of flour and feed sacks. Too poor to buy real makeup, Parton would use pokeberry juice to redden her lips and the burned end of a matchstick to do her brows. When her sharecropper father caught her, he’d whip her and try to wash it off. “Back then, any woman who wore makeup in the mountains was considered trashy,” she wrote. “But I didn’t care.” She’d plead to her dad that it was “her natural color.” He’d snap, “‘Natural color,’ my ass! You get in there and get that off of you.” After she began to make some money from singing bits on Knoxville’s popular Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour, she went to the local drugstore to buy herself some Maybelline. Store-bought makeup and clothing that fit her form gave her courage. She wrote, “I remember feeling powerful enough to go up against Daddy or Grandpa to say, ‘Now, that’s not that tight. It ain’t cut that low. It ain’t that much.’ And they’d say, ‘Yes, it is!’ But I’d be willing to get my ass whupped for it.” She wore anything gaudy that she could lay her hands on. An unusually candid photo of Parton, taken early in her career, shows her eyes painted with large half-moons of blue, reflective eye shadow. Her earrings are as big as saucers. Her hair is bound with a purple headband, and her head is tilted at a cocky angle as she stares straight and unsmiling at the camera. It is a portrait of not a girl but a challenger, a young woman of utter defiance. You weren’t going to catch that Dolly being bullied by classmates for the “coat of many colors” that her mama had sewn out of rags. You could bet she wasn’t going to stay under the dirt-caked thumb of her father, in that cabin that had no plumbing or electricity, for much longer, either. Her mother understood. She’d surreptitiously sew a little sass and lift into those homemade clothes: “Now, don’t tell your daddy I put some push-ups in that dress.” The day after Parton graduated high school, she packed everything she had in four grocery bags from the Piggly Wiggly and caught the bus to Nashville. “My matching luggage,” she called those paper sacks. Her rise to stardom in Nashville probably came with more sexual harassment than anyone will ever know. She spent seven years accompanying Porter Wagoner on his hit TV show and then had the sense to wrest herself out of his domineering hands. “I couldn’t just stay there forever being somebody’s girl singer,” she wrote about her break with Wagoner. She added, “I never was one to be told what to do for too long because I never could do what anybody else told me to do if it went against who I am.” In a 2023 interview with The Guardian to promote her book, she said: “I always knew how to put a man in his place without making him feel bad. If sometimes that don’t work, I’m also strong as a boy—I know how to push you off and get the hell away from you.” She was strong enough to withstand Wagoner when he sued her for leaving his show and she had to settle with him for $1 million, strong enough to reject Elvis Presley when he demanded half of her publishing rights to record her song “I Will Always Love You,” and strong enough to resist all of the advice from agents and record moguls who wanted her to tone down her look. She turned the tables on people who made fun of her—“You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap,” she said—and earned the nickname “Iron Butterfly.” She amassed a collection of more than 200 wigs. When people asked her how long it took to do her hair, she quipped: “I don’t know. I’m never there.” With that in mind, listen anew to “Jolene.” It’s got all of Parton’s fabulous contradiction in it, the arch-femininity paired with command. What a mistake to take the song’s traditional “please don’t take my man” superficial pleading as weakness. Trumping the lyrics is Parton’s soaring voice and that galloping triplet rhythm. It might be her most deceptively powerful song. Parton never called herself a feminist. She rejected the label for much the same reason that she was steadfastly apolitical, at least in public. She couldn’t stand to be told who she was or what to say. She said in her Guardian interview that once you pick a political side, “you’re not allowed to think nothing else. Well, how crippling is that?” When Barbara Walters asked her in 1977 why she continued to court derision with her garish getups, Parton said: “I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable. That’s the easiest thing in the world to do.” The simple truth of Parton’s style is that it made a diminutive, rags-poor girl from the backwoods feel bold enough to explore her gorgeous flute of a throat and sing in public. As her career progressed, she found her own voice in endeavors including acting and philanthropy. Being “under the lights, you want to feel important,” she wrote. The stage “makes me want to try to live up to my shiny clothes. It’s like, okay, you got on this outfit. You’re going to have to rise to the occasion.” Rise, she did.