The Truth About Dolly Parton’s Style

Dolly Parton was just 5-foot-nothing tall.

She needed platform heels to make her feel that she could fill a performance space.

Her husband, Carl Dean, once told her that from the audience, her platinum wigs made her tiny figure look like a Q-tip.

But no amount of mocking could make her surrender the hair, heels, and rhinestones, which were her own brand of feminism under wraps.

“Believe it or not, I had to fight for that look!” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, Behind the Seams .

The look wasn’t about showbiz.

It was about sovereignty.

And it must have been more than passingly rewarding for Parton to know that her audience finally understood this about her before she died, at the age of 80—to know that she was fully appreciated for the wallop of woman she was.

She had so much guts, smarts, and self-ownership beneath the taffetized country-music artifice that sold more than 100 million records. [ Read: ] We’re living in the world Dolly Parton built There was no hint of glamour in the Tennessee hill country where Parton grew up, just unadorned, worn-out women like her mother, who’d married at 15 and had a dozen children by the age of 35.

Parton’s first dresses were made of flour and feed sacks.

Too poor to buy real makeup, Parton would use pokeberry juice to redden her lips and the burned end of a matchstick to do her brows.

When her sharecropper father caught her, he’d whip her and try to wash it off.

“Back then, any woman who wore makeup in the mountains was considered trashy,” she wrote.

“But I didn’t care.” She’d plead to her dad that it was “her natural color.” He’d snap, “‘Natural color,’ my ass! You get in there and get that off of you.” After she began to make some money from singing bits on Knoxville’s popular Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour , she went to the local drugstore to buy herself some Maybelline.