100 Most Influential People in Fashion

Fashion Influential #58: Grace Jones

MTV Europe Music Awards 2008 - Best Of Selection

Grace Jones onstage at the MTV Europe Music Awards, held at the Echo Arena on November 6, 2008 in Liverpool, England. (Getty Images)more pics » GRACE JONES
Born:
May 19, 1948 in Spanish Town, Jamaica
Fans:
Andy Warhol, Tyra Banks, Madonna
Fan of:
Issey Miyake, Keith Harring, Andy Warhol, her brother
Beginnings.
Jamaican-born Grace Jones was once a successful fashion model - she even landed a Vogue cover - but she never took modeling too seriously. She stopped getting jobs after she shaved her eyebrows and shaved her head...and really began to make her mark on fashion. With her height, striking features, and outrageous stage costumes and demeanor, Jones was the physical representation of the '80s power diva.

Career Highs.
Grace Jones had a string of successful disco albums in the late '70s, which helped her to become one of the most popular fixtures on the New York club scene (she was Andy Warhol's muse). In the early '80s, she and her then-boyfriend Jean-Paul Goude transformed her look, adopting the shoulder-padded, flat-topped androgyny that landed her roles in Conan the Destroyer and A View to Kill.
Models are there to look like mannequins, not like real people. Art and illusion are supposed to be fantasy.
- Grace Jones

Grace Jones' red carpet gallery.
Career Lows.
Between 1989's Bulletproof Heart and 2008's Hurricane, Jones went nearly twenty years without releasing an album. Her record company, Island, was bought out by Universal, which favored repackaging her greatest hits over releasing new material. Jones made up for the lack of exposure by punching up the crazy (see her red carpet gallery for proof).

Legacy.
The popularity of Jones' daring, gender-bending look was a sign of the times. At the height of Jones' popularity in the early '80s, women were joining the workforce in record numbers. Many of them sported heavily tailored, mannish suits with shoulder pads and wide pant legs - androgynous looks that might not have infiltrated popular culture, had it not been for Jones.

Forget Tyra: Grace Jones is still the fiercest lady on the red carpet.
Get the Look.
Jones' look is about drama. If you choose to dress like old school Grace Jones, wear a severely tailored suit with dramatic hair and eye makeup. These days Jones tends to avoid the suits, choosing instead to appear masked, caped, or inappropriately hatted. Basically: dress like a glitter-loving superhero.

- Alicia