Ten Years Behind

Darlings, lend an ear & mind your hems, because this is one of those proper Hollywood fairytales stitched not in satin modesty but in rhinestone audacity!

Born Nuta Kotlyarenko (Нута Котляренко, if you fancy the Cyrillic), on a wintry December day in 1902, this Ukrainian émigré reinvented himself under the razzle dazzle handle Nudie Cohn, & by heaven did he earn it! By the time America had clocked him properly, he was less a tailor & more a one man spectacle… the sort who turned a sewing machine into a confetti cannon. Nudie didn’t merely make clothes… he gilded the West! Stone by sparkling stone, until cowboys looked like kings & singers strutted as though the sun itself had taken notes.

Nudie & his wife Helen Kruger packed themselves off to California in the early Forties, doing what so many hopeful souls did: setting up shop in a garage & getting on with it. There, amid oil stains & optimism… they cut, stitched, & dreamed. The legend goes that in 1947, Nudie persuaded a young and skint country singer, Tex Williams, to flog a horse at auction & buy him a sewing machine with the proceeds. Fair swap, mind you: in return, Nudie kitted Williams out. That humming machine turned out to be worth its weight in gold lamé, because before long the word was out. The look caught on. The sparkle spread.

Soon enough, the Cohns flung open the doors of ‘Nudie’s of Hollywood’, perched at the corner of Victory Boulevard & Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood, dealing exclusively in Western wear, which at the time was frightfully the thing. Only this wasn’t your standard cowboy clobber. Nudie took the already flamboyant Western style & sent it up like a Catherine wheel. Rhinestones were lobbed on by the handful, chain stitch embroidery told entire epics across backs & trouser legs, & themes galloped everywhere: wagons, wheels, moons, stars, UFOs, songs…

One of the earliest jaw droppers came in 1962, when Nudie dreamt up a peach coloured suit for Porter Wagoner, positively dripping in rhinestones, complete with a covered wagon blazing across the back & wagon wheels rolling down the legs. Nudie didn’t even charge him! Why would he? Wagoner was walking publicity, a moving hoarding with a microphone. Nudie’s gamble paid off handsomely. Orders poured in. By 1963 the business had outgrown its seams & relocated to a bigger spread on Lankershim Boulevard, rebadged with rodeo bravado as ‘Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors’.

What followed was nothing short of sartorial folklore. Many of his designs became inseparable from the stars who wore them. Elvis Presley shimmered in a $10,000 gold lamé suit, immortalised on the sleeve of “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong”. Hank Williams was wrapped in white, his cowboy suit singing with musical notation stitched along the sleeves. Gram Parsons went gloriously rogue in the suit he wore on ‘The Gilded Palace of Sins’: pills, poppies, marijuana leaves, naked ladies, & a whopping great cross, all splashed across fabric like a confessional gone psychedelic.

Hollywood came knocking too. Roy Rogers & Dale Evans rode the silver screen in Nudie finery. Robert Redford swaggered in one of his creations for ‘Electric Horseman’. Rock royalty followed suit, quite literally, with Jimmy Page stepping out in a black dragon embroidered number that burned itself into memory… & the client list? Pure name dropping heaven! John Lennon, John Wayne, Gene Autry, George Jones, Cher, Ronald Reagan, Elton John, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis, Michael Landon, Glen Campbell, Michael Nesmith, Hank Snow, Hank Thompson, & whole bands besides. ZZ Top even posed in their Nudie suits for the cover of ‘Fandango!’, beards & bling in perfect harmony!

Porter Wagoner later admitted he’d amassed 52 Nudie suits, each costing the price of a small house, while Belgian entertainer Bobbejaan Schoepen collected 35 full stage outfits, making his hoard the biggest in Europe. Clearly, once Nudie got you, you stayed got.

And Nudie himself? He was half the show. He minced about town in his own rhinestone explosions, crowned with glittering cowboy hats, never one to blend in quietly. His most peculiar trademark was a pair of mismatched boots, worn on purpose. They were a reminder, he reckoned, of the lean Thirties, when he couldn’t afford a matching pair. Sentimental, but with swagger.

Promotion came naturally to him. Nudie never met a mirror, or a dollar bill, he didn’t like. According to his granddaughter Jamie Lee Nudie, he’d sometimes pay for things with notes bearing stickers of his own face plastered over George Washington’s. His line, delivered with a wink? “When you get sick of looking at me, just rip it off & spend it.”