In her Tennessee town, they called her the “town tramp”. Extremely long red nails, high heels with little plastic fish inside, short skirts, low-cut blouses. To almost everyone, she was synonymous with bad taste. To a girl named Dolly Parton, she was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.
“When people said, ‘she’s nothing but trash,’ I always replied: that’s what I’ll be when I grow up”, Parton told The Guardian. Her grandfather, a preacher, physically punished her for trying to dress that way. She admitted it herself: “she was willing to pay for it”.
That forbidden fascination ended up becoming the basis of one of music’s most recognizable styles: huge hair, intense makeup, and rhinestones everywhere.
Everything is documented in her book “Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones”, published in October 2023, with 450 photos of a career built on what others called vulgar.