Corset, Lipstick and a Little Drama

The look we now remember as unmistakably Rocky Horror began with things that were already there. At a moment when vintage, second-hand and new clothes increasingly share the same wardrobe, its beginnings feel unexpectedly familiar.

The corset cost three pounds.

Tim Curry first wore it in a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids at Glasgow Citizens Theatre. Bought from a market stall in Glasgow, it was worn back to front. When Sue Blane later designed the costumes for The Rocky Horror Show, she borrowed the same corset from the theatre.

There was little reason to treat it as an object with a future. Blane was working with a small budget, sourcing clothes from junk shops and flea markets around London. Many of the original stage costumes were not expected to last beyond the show’s three-week run.

The film that followed in 1975 went on to become the longest-running theatrical release in cinema history. Clothes assembled for a short run became part of a visual language repeated for more than fifty years.

Corset, fishnets, platform heels, dark lipstick. Pieces with different origins became difficult to separate from the character wearing them. What had been found, borrowed and carried over began to look as though it had always belonged together.

Pearls, leather, sequins, makeup. Nothing in the image is trying to disappear.

Old clothes enter wardrobes with their own histories now. A vintage piece can sit beside something newly bought or something already owned, without any of them having been made with the others in mind. Once worn together, those separate histories become much harder to see. Frank-N-Furter’s corset makes that process unusually literal. Before it became part of one of cinema’s most familiar looks, it had already belonged to another character.

Richard O’Brien, Tim Curry and Patricia Quinn, 1975.

A Little Drama

Actually, the pieces did more than fit together. They refused to disappear into a polished whole. The corset looked like a corset. The makeup announced itself as makeup. Platform heels changed the posture. Fishnets, pearls and gloves added one visible decision after another.

There is little effortless glamour in Rocky Horror. Its glamour shows its construction. Dressing exaggerates the body, changes the posture and makes the act of getting dressed part of what we see. The pieces came from different places, but none of them tried very hard to go unnoticed. Together, they became recognisable without becoming rigid.

A style does not always begin as a style. Something borrowed, something found, something carried over because it worked. Given enough repetition, the arrangement begins to look inevitable.

Opening image: The 1975 film stars Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick and Richard O’Brien, who also wrote the original stage musical.