An Appraisal
Michael Jackson - A Sequined Glove That Mesmerized the World

By GUY TREBAY
Published: June 26, 2009

IT was impossible to look away from him — not when he was a dimpled child singer crowned with a pillowy Afro, not when he became a pop demigod uniformed in rhinestones and epaulets to command what were always referred to as his armies of fans, and not when his surgical transformations mirrored back to the culture the blurring of boundaries demarcating adulthood, sex and even race.

There is no way to know what was on Michael Jackson’s mind as he journeyed from boy to man and partway back, from a brown-skinned man to one so pale he required an umbrella when he went out in the sun, and from a pop star with a quirky but defined masculinity to one who seemed most comfortable in a more nebulous zone. What seems clear is that all of it was considered. All of it was intentional.

More than almost any entertainer in memory, Michael Jackson was entirely of show business. From age 5, he was seldom out of costume, and so it is not surprising that his prodigious musical talents were matched by a genius for deploying the symbolic language of fashion in an age dominated by visual mediums.

Few entertainers can be identified solely on the basis of their clothes, and yet a single sequined glove held aloft signifies only one name.

The glove was merely an element in an image devised with mastery and with the powerful assistance of the then-new pop cultural phenomenon of music videos. There was also the trademark black fedora. There were the military costumes — part tin-pot dictator, part Emerald City of Oz — designed for him over the years by the Los Angeles costume designers Dennis Tompkins and Michael Bush. There were the show-biz tricks, the soft-soled black loafers and shortened trousers and the white socks used to direct the eye to a dancer’s footwork — a move Mr. Jackson picked up from Fred Astaire.

In his 1980s heyday, Michael Jackson drastically revamped the image of a pop idol, layering elements of suavity adapted from Brit-pop boy bands with old-style Hollywood glamour, and coiffures that made unconscious reference to a hair obsession that had preoccupied black soul singers since James Brown got his first conk. Curiously enough, his look of that period has lately experienced a fashion renaissance, in the form of big-shouldered, glitter-covered 1980s clothes coveted by followers of the Balmain designer Christophe Decarnin.......

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