So sad for Amy Winehouse, we will miss you!

Photographed by Bruce Weber

“The more insecure I feel, the bigger my beehive gets,” Amy Winehouse once confessed. Winehouse, who died on Saturday at the age of 27, was, like so many great artists, a heartbreaking mix of genius and sadness: at once seemingly supremely confident in her extraordinary talent, but fearful and desperate in so many other aspects of her young life.

The authority of her vision captivated from the start, not just the scope of her musical gift, but her embrace of the striking, take-no-prisoners style made famous by the girl groups of the 1960s: towering, ratted coiffures, tight dresses, Cleopatra eyes, offhand cigarettes dangling from louche crimson lips.

(So accurate was this homage that Ronnie Spector, ex-wife of the notorious Phil and front-woman of the Ronettes, admitted that when she first saw a photograph of Winehouse in the New York Post, she exclaimed, “ ‘That’s me!’ But then I found out, no, it’s Amy! I didn’t have on my glasses.”)

Winehouse’s fashion acumen was sufficiently dazzling to entrance Karl Lagerfeld—the designer accoutred models in his 2007 London Chanel pre-fall show with high hair and dramatic eyes in her honor. “She is a beautiful, gifted artist,” Lagerfeld said at the time. “And I very much like her hairdo. I took it as an inspiration. Because, in fact, it was also Brigitte Bardot’s hairdo in the late fifties and sixties. And now Amy has made it her own style. For me, it was a double clin d’oeil. It is Brigitte Bardot and Amy Winehouse.”
 
If the singer can be credited with lending a fresh eye to the sexy street styles of the early sixties, Winehouse also paid tribute to the extraordinary soundtrack of those years. Her embrace of soul-infused R&B ushered in a new generation of haunting British female artists, from Duffy to Adele.
 
But it is Lady Gaga, another performer who combines a searing gift with a rule-breaking personal presentation, who best summed up Winehouse’s power of reinvention—the ability, in art, as in life, to compel your audience to accept, appreciate, and eventually adore you on your own terms. “I will always have a very deep love for Amy Winehouse,” Gaga has said. “She’s a different kind of woman—because of Amy, very strange girls like me go to prom with very good-looking guys.” 

In a cri de coeur at the start of her brief, mesmerizing career, Winehouse sang,  “I told you, I was trouble. Yeah, you know that I’m no good.” Would that the people who loved her could have convinced her just how wrong she was, before it was too late.

July 25, 2011 11:11 a.m.

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