Michael Stipe Reviews His 35 Greatest Fits: “This Was the F***ing Coolest Jacket on Earth”
For many years, Michael Stipe, who turned 64 in January, was the lead singer of R.E.M., a now-defunct rock band that formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980. It feels strange to say this like it’s new information, but in conversation, Stipe has a charming way of talking about this part of his life as if it’s something people might not know. (When he mentions Peter Buck, R.E.M.’s guitarist, he says “my former guitar player, Peter Buck,” even though, because he’s Michael Stipe, he could probably just say “Peter” and most people would get it.)
After basically pioneering the indie-rock-obscurantism-to-stadium-rock-ubiquity career arc, influencing generation upon generation of underground guitar bands, and selling over 90 million albums in the process, R.E.M. dissolved amicably in 2011. Although Stipe has been chipping away at new music for his long-awaited debut solo album in recent years, his primary creative focus for the past decade-and-change has been visual art. “I have lost and I have been lost but for now I’m flying high,” a major exhibition of his work in various mediums including sculpture, photography, ceramics, video, and custom-embroidered watch caps opened at the Fondazione ICA Milano in Milan, Italy in December, and runs through March; his fourth book Even the Birds Gave Pause, a companion to the ICA show, goes on sale in April.
This month, Stipe could also be seen looming above Soho in a leopard-print Saint Laurent shirt; he’s one of the faces of the label’s Spring 2024 campaign, along with Lauren Hutton and Diana Ross. Although this modeling gig is Stipe’s first real foray into high fashion, he’s always been a distinctive, risk-taking dresser– although he says his his self-presentation as a performer was mostly about hiding in plain sight.
“I was incredibly shy,” Stipe says. "I have this scar right in the middle of my eyebrows from a car wreck when I was 18. I took out the steering wheel and then went through the windshield, and so I always wore my hair to cover the scar, and I had really bad skin, so yeah, I would just cover up and I'd put on as many layers as I possibly could and then keep the lights really low. That was how we did it until we were playing much larger places. By [R.E.M.’s] third album, I had started to open up a little bit, but it wasn't easy. I've always worn a lot of layers, as a protective device in a way to help present myself publicly, whether it's at a small birthday party or on stage in front of a large group of people.
“It was a way of walking on stage,” he says, “and not fainting. I would be fine after the third song, but I'd have to jack my adrenaline up to where I would go into basically a trance state and then nothing mattered. As I got warmer, the clothes would come off, so it became really quite theatrical. By the end of the show. I would be down to a T-shirt or nothing on top, and that always looked really good.”
Over time, as Stipe became more famous—and at least relatively more at ease in the public eye—he started dressing with more intention. One of his earliest sartorial mentors was Jeremy Ayers, an Athens-born writer, photographer and musician who Stipe describes as “one of the earliest loves of my life.” After leaving Georgia for New York, Ayers had become part of the scene around Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he was known as “Sylva Thinn.”
“He dressed as a woman,” Stipe said, “and presented as a woman most of the time that he was there with Andy. But when he moved back to Georgia, he just would dress like a scarecrow. He would go thrift shopping and pull all these really classic looks together, but he always had something that was off, or amiss. I took that and ran with it and kind of made it my own thing.
“I wanted, as a teenager, to be like this hairless, androgynous David Bowie type,” Stipe said, “and I'm exactly the opposite of that. I've got bad skin and I've got funny hair. I always did. Courtney Love and I talked about this a lot with each other, early in our friendship. We both were just from the island of broken toys, and we would never fit into that look that we wanted to fit into. If I was trying to wear something that was completely tailored and gorgeous, I looked ridiculous in it. So if it was a little bit off, it always looked a bit better. Rumpled is better. I have to wear things that are extremely tailored and then they fall apart while they're on me, and that's a good look.”
A few days after the Saint Laurent billboards debuted in New York, Stipe dialed in to a FaceTime call to talk about the evolution of his style and annotate some images of his many iconic looks; he’d been staying in Georgia, in a house he bought when he was twenty-five, and occasionally he’d jump up from his seat, disappear into another room, and return with some priceless vintage piece from his personal archives. What was supposed to be a brief conversation ended up exceeding 90 minutes; Stipe is a visual learner, he explained, “so I see the picture, the clothes, and I’m instantly reminded of the era, of the moment.”