Music legend, beat generation icon, and underwear spokesman Bob Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature today, a first for a musician. The committee awarded it to the singer-songwriter for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” which seems an accurate assessment to any one who’s read his lyrics or cracked open the first volume of his autobiography Chronicles. To many people Dylan transcends the traditional idea of music maker and, over the years, has ascended to the role of cultural icon. If that seems overblown, perhaps Dylan himself said it best: “All I can be is me — whoever that is.”
And while Dylan’s musical legacy is rich and varied — and has itself created a cottage industry of critical theory — we’re here to talk about a more straightforward contribution he’s made to the American canon, and that’s in his style. His look: low-key, unassuming, with a thrift store quality, helped define the visual tone of the music scene in downtown New York during the 1960s, a look that soon spread across the country. It is an aesthetic that’s been mined time and again by fashion designers (see: Hedi Slimane, John Varvatos, Tom Ford) who have reimagined and recut many of the artist’s now-iconic looks as wardrobe staples for a new generation of swagger-seeking men.
Looking back, Dylan wasn’t a revolutionary dresser, but what he wore always conveyed a sense of effortless confidence. And that’s the most undeniable takeaway when you study iconic images of the music hero through his career: In his mussed-up hair, a pair of classic Ray-Bans, in the leather jackets and turtlenecks, there was a sense of undeniable, and unstudied, cool.
