Discover the individuals that, like Stevie Nicks, have shaped the Firm’s creative director and designer’s aesthetics, philosophy and work in the series ICONS.
Her signature style, psychedelic hippie with Gothic tints, made of flared sleeves and pants, tunics, high-waisted jeans, towering 15-centimeter platforms, and tousled blonde mullet with bangs, has survived up and down the stage and over the decades – although with the concessions to the excess of makeup and big hair of the ’80s.
Inspired by nature and with a strong use of metaphors and mysticism in her lyrics, Stevie Nicks is a music icon that with her charisma, her gently broken voice, her delicate country rock pop and her particular style, have inspired generations of artists, from Sheryl Crow, Florence Welch, Lorde or The Dixie Chicks. In recent years we have seen her take the stage with Taylor Swift or Harry Styles, and a few years ago she inspired (and made a brief cameo in the video clip of) the Bootylicious song of Destiny’s Child, with a young Beyoncé.
Stephanie Lynn Nicks was born in 1948 in Pheonix, USA. She inherited from his grandfather the love for music and entertainment, and from her mother the love for fairy tales and mysticism. Avid music consumer in her teens, at age 16 she composed her first song, I’ve Loved and I’ve Lost, and I’m Sad But Not Blue. Soon she joins the band of her high school sweetheart Linsdey Buckingham, the psychedelic rock group Fritz, with whom they would open for Jimmi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, among others. Joplin’s live performances helped create Nicks’ stage persona.
Meanwhile, the English band Fleetwood Mac suffered two losses in their line-up related to poor sales of their latest albums and drugs. Impressed by Buckingham’s guitar talent, and first wanting to prescind from Nicks, they were both invited to join the group’s ranks in 1974. The contrasts of Fleetwood Mac’s hard rock and the more pop vision of Nicks and Buckingham, as well as the contrast between UK vs. USA both backgrounds, of the senior and junior musicians, and their unusual mixed formation resulted in their self-titled album with which they would reap millions of sales and vast international recognition.
The recording of the second album was more stormy. The deteriorating relationships of the sentimental couples of the group Nicks and Buckingham, and of the marriage Christine and John McVie (the Mc of Fleetwood Mac), as well as the abuse of alcohol and cocaine by the entire band, led to a visceral and painful process of 13 months and over $1 million in production costs. The ups and downs of the band, the arguments and relationship problems, the location changes, the producer changes… The rumors that the press made up about their parties, drugs, love life, and the alleged witchcraft of Nicks made them appear in press week yes, week too. This whole scenario gave rise to their second album together, the masterpiece Rumors, the fifth best-selling album in history behind only Michael Jackson, ACDC, Meat Loaf and Pink Floyd. As Nicks herself comments, “the more painful the feelings and the process, the better the play; no pain, no gain”.
Drugs and fighting addiction to cocaine and tranquilizers have been a constant in Nicks’ life. Recovered for over two decades, she has always been very open and sincere about this topic, and shows no qualms in recognizing that there are times like some entire tours in the 80s and the early 90s that she barely remembers. However, this never prevented her from continuing her activities with the band and giving memorable live shows, as well as developing a successful solo career.
More than 140 million records sold. Over 40 singles on the top sales charts. Countless Grammy’s and nominations. Only woman to enter the Rock’n roll Hall Of Fame twice. It is not for anything else that she is also known as Queen of Rock’n roll.
