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# Nudie and the Technicolor Jacket
- URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/nudie-and-the-technicolor-jacket/
- Published: 2005-06-05T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2005-06-05T00:00:00.000Z
- Author: JewsRock
- Tags: Words, #Import 2026-08-16 01:56, Essays

*By Eddie Dean*

To any who would deny the unholy allure of the Nudie suit, consider the case of Little Jimmy Dickens. His name is not often invoked when talk turns to Nudie’s most famous creations, such as the gold-leaf tux he designed for Elvis back in ’57\. Even with all its fiery revenge-of-Prometheus brilliance, the Presley tux pales next to Nudie’s finest work, the bespangled, Glory-Be-To-God-For-Dappled-Things costumes that adorned country stars of the postwar era.

Gram Parsons in his Nudie suit. Photo courtesy Jim McCrary, www.jimmccrary.com

One of these stars was Little Jimmy Dickens, who specialized in noxious novelty songs like "May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose." In the Southern sideshow that was 1950s Nashville, the four-foot-eleven Dickens played up his freak status to the hilt, cavorting in his Nudie cowboy suit like an extra from the all-midget Western musical "Terror of Tiny Town," when in fact he hailed from the hollows of West Virginia. And here’s the clincher—the Nudie suit not only transformed Dickens from backwoods runt to Opryland hero, it was an undeniable factor in his astonishing ability to get laid by a bevy of Music City beauties.

In short, Nudie turned Little Jimmy into a Tennessee stud, and that is beyond the ken of a mere tailor. It is the work of a true visionary of the cloth. What Nudie wove from the fabric of twentieth-century America went beyond even the wildest fantasies of Polish artist Bruno Schulz daydreaming in his father’s clothing shop. Nudie was a magician, a conjuror of collective fantasy that culminated in the ultimate hat trick—a conversion of the counterculture to the Holy Order of the Rhinestone Cowboys.

As an American rags-to-rhinestones saga, Nudie Cohn’s rates right up there. The son of a boot maker, he was born Nutya Kotlyrenko in Kiev, Ukraine, and was christened "Nudie" by one of those Ellis Island clerks conversant in the mysterious ways of names forging destiny. He started at the bottom, as a shoeshine boy on Brooklyn streetcorners—and in the late 1910s went to Hollywood, where he did grunt work as a film extra. By the 30s, he was back in New York, where he found his calling as a tailor’s apprentice (namely sewing pasties and G-strings for strip-tease queens). But the West beckoned—it emanated an elusive Oz-like splendor that the East Coast couldn’t match—so he and his wife, Bobbie, headed back to California, where they opened a tailor shop out of their garage in Los Angeles.

Fate walked in one day, going by the name of Tex Williams, the Western Swing singing star, the man who made "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)" a million-seller. Williams needed to outfit his ten-man band. Tex loaned Nudie money for a new sewing machine and gave him his first break. Roy Rogers later claimed he was the one who nudged Nudie into the wild turquoise yonder of flash and glitter: "I got to playin’ these big, Madison Square Garden auditoriums. When they introduced you, you’d come out, and you’d look like a little doll, you’re so far away. So I thought, 'I gotta figure out some way where the people can at least see me.’ So I started with Nudie, talked him into makin’ me those real flashy things. So, when I come through the gates and the spots hit us, we lit up like a Christmas tree."

Nudie’s philosophy was simple: "My impression of an entertainer is that he should wear a flashy outfit to be fair to the public."

Of course, what both men are really talking about is sex appeal. Before Nudie and his fellow Western-wear designers like Nathan Turk, hillbilly fashion was still mired in the past; a tattered, musty wardrobe of Depression-era duds: drab buckskins and shabby Stetsons and faded overalls. Country singers looked too much like what they actually were—skinny, scoliotic Southerners and gawky Midwestern farm boys. Nudie dressed them up like strutting roosters, adding a peacock profusion of color and the sort of ceremonial, primal machismo that you find in mariachi bands and matadors and Audubon’s Birds of North America paintings. It was still cowboy all the way, but a cowboy gone native and somehow uptown at once, equal parts Gary Cooper and Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, with surreal, pantheistic dashes of Navajo brave, Mardi Gras chief, and Aztec warrior.

By the late 1940s, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors shop on Victory and Vineland was a one-stop-shopping mecca for any singing cowboy worth his imitation spurs. The affable Nudie made fast friends with his celebrity clientele, who felt at home being fitted for a suit by a tailor who wore the same gaudy designs they did. At the peak of his fame, Hank Williams became a loyal customer and confidante, inspiring some of Nudie’s all-time classics, like the sky-blue, rhinestoned "Lovesick Blues" Special with embroidered musical notes cascading down the front. Another early piece de resistance was a custom job for honky-tonk crooner Lefty Frizzell, the first Nudie shirt that featured rhinestone-studded initials. With the twin blessing of Hank and Lefty, Nudie became a star in his own right, and suddenly everybody in Nashville wanted a Nudie suit. Like some stumpy Stetson-crowned Merlin spraying pixie dust, Nudie was a savvy image-maker, bestowing costumes with gimmicky motifs—wagon wheels for Porter Wagoner and husky dogs for Ferlin Husky—that gave country its signature style just as it was making the transition from the sole provenance of Southern hillbillies to the music of mainstream America.

Arrayed in their glittering Nudie suits and boots and ten-gallon hats, the country stars roamed the backroads, alighting from their tour buses like household gods, greeting their worshipping fans as if they were family. The Nudie suit was their shining armor of celebrity, a force field that sent off sparks of divine aura while still allowing for the intimacy of handshakes and small-talk. A jug-eared squirt like Hank Snow, swathed in a Nudie suit of deepest turquoise, became much more than a refugee from a Nova Scotia fishing village: he was the Singing Ranger, resplendent in gabardine from Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors. Terms like "classy" or "tasteful"—this sort of polite-society decorum didn’t mean squat in the postwar Wild West of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. As Warren Oates once put it, "I feel most uncomfortable in a Western role, because my image of a Western man is John Wayne, and I’m just a little shit. When I think of the Western role, I think that the man has to be bigger than life, bigger than the screen." Even John Wayne needed help being John Wayne: he was a regular customer at Nudie’s shop.

So was a charismatic reverend named Leonard Eilers, who was known as the Preaching Cowboy. Between the efforts of Eilers and an evangelizing Dale Evans, Nudie and his wife became active in the Hollywood Presbyterian Church, and in 1963, he converted to Christianity. His family was shocked—his brother Cactus even threatened to disown him—but Nudie never officially returned to his faith. On the other hand, he also never forgot his roots: to commemorate his past, he wore a Star of David and a Chai around his neck along with a cross. Oddly enough, he also managed to inspire the Cohn family electrician, Harry Gibson, to become a Jew. While Nudie stopped going to shul, Gibson became a regular attendee, and to this day, he stops by the Cohn residence to visit Nudie’s widow Bobbie on Saturdays after services.

That would have been the end of the story, with the Nudie suit fading into the sunset as another dated fashion casualty, if it weren’t for Gram Parsons. The Georgia longhair was a longtime Nudie devotee and on a roll after helping to invent country-rock on the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Flush with a record-company advance for his new band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Parsons strolled into the Rodeo Tailor shop in '68 ready to out-Nudie Nudie himself. He ordered up some designs for his bandmates—golden pterodactyls and neon peacocks. But he reserved the most outlandish motifs for his own custom suit: It boasted marijuana leaves and Benzedrine pills splashed across a field of white, with naked women stitched right across the front lapels and red roses around the crotch; on the back shone the Holy Cross spewing sparks like a Sunset Strip marquee that had blown a fuse.

The Burritos wore the suits with a stoned slouch, infusing just the right touch of camp irony on the cover of their landmark debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin. That’s how Nudie became hip with the hippies and the hipsters alike. Everyone from ex-Monkee Michael Nesmith to Steve McQueen to Sly Stone was seen sporting Nudie suits, and Sly even took to yodeling on There’s a Riot Goin’ On’s "Spaced Cowboy," a song title that neatly sums up the Nudie aesthetic.

That’s how Nudie Cohn, former maker of G-strings, became the first 66-year-old Jewish tailor to make it on the cover of Rolling Stone—wearing a Nudie suit, of course. And, for the next decade, the Nudie suit entered its second phase as a sort of badge of Decadent Insider Chic: ZZ Top and Elton John and Cher and Mick Jagger and faded folk-rock rebel Phil Ochs, who ordered a remake of the Elvis gold-lame suit, all sported them. Nudie embraced the new generation of freaks and scene-makers as warmly as he did singing-cowboy brothers of yore. Unflappable as ever, Nudie tooled around Hollywood in his custom El Dorado convertible, with silver-dollar-studded dashboard, pistol door-handles, and steer horns on the hood.

Two decades after Cohn’s death from stomach cancer, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors is no more. His widow, Bobbie, closed its doors and retired in ’94\. But the Nudie suit lives on, as disciples like Marty Stuart keep the faith. Even so, Stuart’s best intentions can’t hide the fact that he looks like a redneck pud in his beloved Nudie wardrobe because he’s too damn self-conscious—and nobody has the nerve to tell Stuart that a mullet and a Nudie suit don’t mix. The spirit is there, but the flesh isn’t willing. It’s like those well-meaning rockabilly revival acts that get everything right except the blasphemous abandon of the music’s original wild seeds, who were reared in a culture of Southern Repression that is long gone.

My own favorite image of a Nudie suit is from the glory days but far from the glitter of Music City. It is a snapshot of Ernest Tubb at a country-music park in the Pennsylvania sticks. His Stetson shielding his gaunt, haggard mug from the noonday glare, the honky-tonk vampire of a thousand-and-one buckets-of-blood nightclubs is protected from the sun’s death rays by a powder-blue, flower-speckled Nudie suit hugging his scarecrow frame, worn-in as a second skin. He is signing an autograph for a female fan—a good-looking woman in her Sunday best, herself framed by a pearl necklace and pointy church-lady high heels, almost touching Tubb’s surreal Nudie boots. It was the early 60s, when Tubb was living out of his tour bus and looking worse for wear. The photo is a beautiful example of what the Nudie suit was in its essence: work clothes for the rising sons of the salt of the earth, ablaze with the heavenly raiment of the Great Beyond as it "stains the white radiance of Eternity."

That last bit is by Percy Shelley, and he would have looked fine in a Nudie suit.

Eddie Dean is a writer in Rockville, Md. His work appears in Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2000 anthology.

Nudie Girls Jamie and Mary Lynn carry on Nudie's legacy. Check out their website at www.nudiesrodeotailor.com.

And lastly, check out Jewsrock.org's own Nudie Pictures gallery.

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*Eddie Dean is a Washington, D.C.–based journalist and music historian.*