Don’t Forget The Nails | Defector
Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough light to obscure everything save the tits and the hair.
Saying Dolly Parton had a signature look is a bit like saying water has a signature wetness. What she had was a constitutive way of being. What she had was a relationship to femininity that I found, in turns, inspiring and confounding. Inspiring because she was always in on the joke—“it costs a lot of money to look this cheap;” “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde”—and confounding because I would find myself thinking doesn’t she ever get tired of having to be in on the joke?
I’ve never had a particularly vexed relationship with my gender, but I do sometimes find the outward trappings tiring. Possibly this is because there are certain parts of it I’m just not very good at. Style has always been a thing that other people are able to have while I—no matter how much effort or money I expend—kind of just wear clothes. Every once in a while I’ll watch make-up tutorials on Instagram and get annoyed ping-ponging between the women showing me how to do a “no-makeup make-up look” who don’t actually need to wear any make-up and the ones who approach it with the kind of rigor one might more readily associate with big engineering projects. I realized years ago that having very long hair is an easy way to avoid ever having to learn what to do with it, and so when I tip my head back my hair touches my ass.
Which is all to say that I sometimes resent the aspects of femininity that still, despite everything, manage to feel compulsory. Obviously this is not a new insight nor am I alone in it. For more on this see: feminist theory, queer theory, performance studies, or a million other lengthy and nuanced considerations.
These thoughts will be neither lengthy nor nuanced. All I’m trying to say is that the resentful part of me would look at someone like Dolly Parton—who never for one moment of her life fell even a millimeter short of the aesthetic standards she set for herself—and think, God, having to do all that must make her miserable sometimes.
When Dolly’s nephew, Brian Seaver, announced her death on August 25, he noted that “Dolly called me and said she wants to rest in a beautiful bed of plush cotton because after a life wearing heavy rhinestones, she finally deserves to be comfortable and have some rest.” Aha! Vindication! My first thought was that this was a beautiful sentiment, but also finally some proof that all her effortless Dollyness took the kind of work that would wear a woman down.
But as the hours and days went on, and I listened to song after song and watched clip after clip, this reaction seemed both wrong and demeaning. Of course it took work—it took the work of an artist, and her look was no less artful than her songs.
People think of the tits, but I am thinking of the nails. The way she played guitar always felt impressive but doing it with those nails takes it into the realm of the miraculous. You look at those long acrylics and imagine they must be an obstacle to overcome. And yet, for Dolly, they became an instrument of expression. She played them! She wrote “9 to 5” on those nails! This was always the magic of Dolly Parton. She could take something heavy and make it light. She could take something fake and make it real.
