I’ll never forget the moment it happened: I was a sophomore at a small college in Memphis, Tennessee, standing under the tree outside the mail room, when my friend Virginia asked me a question. “Do you like Dolly Parton?”
At the time, I hadn’t thought too much about her. “She has a quote that reminds me of the way you dress,” Virginia went on. “‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.’”
At first, I was offended. Cheap? I thought. Cheap?! I had a closet of carefully sourced vintage clothing. I was wearing Jeffery Campbell Lita boots. My book bag was Prada, for God’s sake. But the more I learned about the country singer, the more I realized that for her, cheap didn’t mean cheap—it just meant showing up and moving through the world on precisely her own terms. It was like lightning had struck me, changing my brain chemistry forever.
Parton had a signature look—it was “a little bit flamboyant” and full of “color and tight clothes,” as she described it to Vogue—and it deeply resonated with me. In the years since that conversation in college, I’ve honed my own sense of style to be just as over-the-top as Parton’s, but in a different style, investing hours a week into wet-setting my hair in curlers, lacing up corsets and girdles, and having my nails painted in precise red half-moons. It’s all flamboyant, tight, and extravagant.
Parton’s public image had very specific roots that she referenced frequently. Her entire vibe was inspired by “the town tramp” in her little corner of the Great Smoky Mountains, a woman she found to be “the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.” The complete picture included long nails (acrylic extensions that doubled as a musical instrument one time with Patti LaBelle!), a sky-high blond hairdo (the wigs…oh, the wigs!), and an exaggerated figure (store-bought!). Parton’s openness about her cosmetic modifications both big and small still feels radical to this day.
On August 25, Parton’s family shared that the country icon had died at the age of 80. I know that my life was far from the only one she changed; she founded the Imagination Library in 1995, sending more than 332 million free books to children over the decades since; and she helped fund the early research that resulted in the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. She’ll be remembered for it all—with another iconic quote to sum it all up: “I may look fake, but I’m real where it counts.”
