It takes nothing away from her voice to say that Cher is a singer for whom the visuals matter. A lot.
It’s her voice, after all, that brought a teenage Cher to the attention of the powerful music producer Phil Spector; that introduced mainstream audiences to the strange science of Auto-Tune; that chided a love-struck Nicolas Cage to “Snap out of it!” Indeed, some of the most memorable Cher impressions are vocal but nonverbal — a descending nasal “hohhh,” sometimes accompanied by a hair toss.
But for Cher, now 78, who released the first volume of her memoir this month, it has always been clear that her status as an entertainment icon rests at least as heavily on what is seen as it does on what is heard. Here’s a look at the visual signifiers that have made Cher into the one-of-a-kind cultural figure she is today.
Her Hair
Is It Real? That’s Beside the Point.
When Cher emerges onscreen in “Moonstruck,” her overgrown corona of dark curls are kissed at the edges with gray. The audience is supposed to see this silvery encroachment as a sign that her character, Loretta Castorini — and, by extension, Cher herself — is getting up there. Age comes for us all, “Moonstruck” declares: even Cher!
Not quite. By the film’s midpoint, Loretta’s hair is dyed back to the jettest of blacks. With that, she sheds a good decade, a fitting onscreen transformation for an actress who has never allowed trivial considerations like age, nature or good taste weigh on her mane considerations.
When Cher erupted as a music star in the 1960s, she wore her hair straight as dry-cleaned trousers. That modish style lingered until about the mid-1970s when, coinciding roughly with her split from Sonny Bono, Cher became one of Hollywood’s great hair experimentalists.
She sampled short bobs; proud curls, often cascading well past her shoulders; mullets; and peacocking blowouts that were loftier than a punk’s mohawk. And, oh, the colors: purple, silver, white, red, brown. She had frosted tips before boy bands were a twinkle in the music industry’s eye. In a 2013 music video, she wore “hair” made entirely from newsprint.
Were they always wigs? Who knows! Who really cares?
— Jacob Gallagher
Her Mackies
A Match Made in Camp Heaven
When the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition on the history of camp in 2019, it came as little surprise that Cher was invited to perform at its opening gala.
For years, her principal collaborator on the outré design front has been Bob Mackie, the godfather of glitter, a man whose genius had little to do with the pretensions of fashion and everything to do with his ability to serve up a salmagundi of sexiness and schlock.
They met in 1967 when Mr. Mackie dressed her for an appearance on “The Carol Burnett Show.” She was demurely attired, by her standards, in a red velvet dress with floral patterned sleeves.
If you liked it, sorry for what came after. Buh-bye, hippie on the prairie, hello, studs and sequins.
On occasion, Mr. Mackie has squirmed at her requests.
Especially in 1986, when Cher called on Mr. Mackie to design her ensemble for presenting at the Academy Awards.
“I was like, ‘You can’t wear this to the Academy Awards. You’re giving an award — you’re going to upstage whoever you give it to,’” Mr. Mackie later said of the Native American-inspired get-up she had asked him to make.
It had a black top that was adorned with S&M details. It left her entire stomach bare. Its main accessory was a black feathered headdress so tall that the camera operators couldn’t zoom in for a close-up without cutting part of it off.
But what better choice existed for a woman whose desire was not to fit into the frame but to go over the top of it, and who knew just whom to turn to in order to make that happen?
— Jacob Bernstein
Her Midriff
‘Life’s a Beach’ as a Philosophy of Dress
In a 1975 episode of her variety show, Cher joked onstage about whether her belly button was insured. “No, who’s going to take it,” she quipped to the audience.
Her navel — which according to pop culture lore was the first bellybutton regularly shown by a woman on television — became emblematic of the skin-baring numbers she began donning at a time when showing midriff (and backside, and front side) wasn’t yet mainstream.
Sequins, straps and feathers, these looks — and the body beneath them — would come to define both her signature style and a fashion era. They also invited plenty of criticism and pearl clutching. A characteristically unbothered Cher had a ready explanation.
“I never had anything on that you couldn’t see on the beach,” she once offered as a riposte to her critics.
— Madison Malone Kircher
Her Bell-Bottoms
For Whom Do They Flare? They Flare for Cher.
When Cher released her cover of Eric Clapton and Bobby Whitlock’s “Bell Bottom Blues” in 1975, it had a powerful impact — not just because of how she sang the song, but because of how she lived the song. Few people, after all, were known to be so intimately acquainted with the joys and heartaches of that particular style of pants.
From the time she and Sonny first appeared on the music scene in the early 1960s, bell-bottoms were part of their bond, and Cher, with her endless legs, wore them every which way: striped, spangled, faux-furred, sequined and floral.
If Mr. Mackie’s beads were her go-to red carpet look, bell-bottoms were her everyday basic. They had flare to match her flair, and even after she and Sonny broke up, she didn’t divorce her signature wardrobe staple. Indeed, she not only continues to wear them, she even put her stamp of approval on an Amazon style and tweeted it out for everyone to see.
Which just goes to show, you can separate the pants and the artist, but you can’t separate the artist from her favorite kind of pants. Nothing blue about it.
— Vanessa Friedman
Her Face
The Features Are the Main Event
If the crudest measure of fame is how easily one can be mimicked, then Cher might be the greatest star of all.
Her features are unmistakable, and thus irresistible to drag queens, caricaturists and anyone else with an occupational interest in exaggerated interpretations of the human face: sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes (perfect canvases for a rainbow of shadows throughout the years); eyelashes that could dust a picture frame on the other side of the room; and, of course, those cheekbones — sky-high cantilevers that would make any cartoonist go gaga. (Al Hirschfeld, for his part, certainly took notice.)
Her cheekbones are almost a calling card in their own right, anchoring her face throughout the decades and whatever interventions she may or may not have taken. It’s telling that promotional art for “The Cher Show,” her 2018 musical hagiography on Broadway, relied on nothing more than three stylized renditions of the singer’s face across the years to hawk the show.
Even abstracted to simple planes and four colors, the images were instantly recognizable as the superstar whose face America has seen on TV screens and magazine covers for over half a century.
— Louis Lucero II
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