Kylie Queen of the World Page 16

Kylie has ‘a brilliant sense of style’ says Will. ‘It’s quite eclectic in a way, just very sexy, glamorous. She just kind of picks something up and slings it on and it looks really chic.’ ‘She’s a living Barbie doll,’ says shoe designer Patrick Cox. ‘All gay men want to play with her, dress her up, comb her hair.’ BarbieKylie herself is quite aware of this appeal: ‘I’m a drag queen trapped in a woman’s body,’ she once said. ‘A very short drag queen trapped in a woman’s body.’

  Uniquely Pete Waterman, Kylie’s original mentor and producer is unmoved by her appeal. ‘I’m the only man in the world who doesn’t find her sexy,’ he said. ‘She’s like a daughter to me. I can’t see her in that way and I chuckle when I see her doing her thing.’

  Pete’s right: he is alone in not finding Kylie sexy. The man responsible for much of that sexiness remains Will. He has coaxed Kylie through innumerable image changes, from IndieKylie to ComebackKylie to SexKylie and back again. ‘Anything we do is a complete collaboration,’ he explains. ‘It’s not like I tell her how to be; it’s a very relaxed process. She’s got all of these different personalities in her head, she’s a real performer and we just work through those. One day she wants to be a cabaret performer or a glitter queen and it’s not contrived in any way, it’s just different sides to her personality. She’s very sexy and quite kitsch, showy but not tacky. Basically, she’s really glamorous. She was born in the wrong era, she should have been a Hollywood starlet.’

  As for the numerous looks Kylie adopts for her videos, Will says: ‘The person Kylie is a product of all her videos she is all those little characters that she plays. She is everything, she is all the images that have ever been portrayed and displayed of her. She is all of those things.’ She can even be eccentric, as Will explained when talking about her video for ‘GBI’ with Towa TEI in 1998: ‘Kylie is a typeface. I mean she is going: “I am a typeface” [in the song and video]. It is like it’s a madness. It is a totally deranged video and a totally deranged idea and she has a totally deranged side. Kylie has a real insanity, a real –’ and here’s that word again ‘– alien-ness about her personality. Sometimes she is very kooky, very eccentric and that comes across in that video more than anything else.’

  It was Will who persuaded Kylie to wear the gold hot pants in the ‘Spinning Around’ video. ‘Kylie’s bottom is like a peach,’ he gushes. ‘Sex sells and her best asset is her bum, so let’s exaggerate it.’ Make-up artist Caroline Barnes supports Will’s view. ‘She doesn’t use anti-cellulite cream – she doesn’t need to,’ she says. ‘It’s totally sickening but she doesn’t have a scrap of orange peel in sight.’ Kylie says she’s mystified by all the attention her bottom receives, particularly when clad in those gold hot pants. ‘I didn’t expect that two years later they would still be getting such attention,’ she says. ‘It got to the point where I figured the hot pants should go out and do all my interviews for me. I love what Willie’s done for me,’ she adds. ‘I think I should embrace the peach analogy he uses for my bum. It could become a pear rapidly.’

  The origins of the miracle that is Kylie’s bottom lie in her early childhood. ‘It can look all right when it has to,’ Kylie admitted once. ‘It’s funny, it’s taken on a life of its own. My brother and sister and I used to have this competition among tickle fights and we’d turn around and go [massive wiggling of backside ensues] – just shake, like that. I always had the movement, the wobbling around. Mine’s got the bounce! All those years in the ugly green unitard paid off.’

  Will was also responsible for the ensemble Kylie wore to the Brits award, which garnered nearly as much attention as the gold hot pants: a £900 custom-made Dolce & Gabbana mini-dress – not everything Kylie wears is second hand – an £80 pair of Agent Provocateur knickers and some £900 Jimmy Choo boots. ‘It’s an image,’ says Kylie. ‘Not reality. Nobody could be like that. When I get home, the stilettos come off, the slippers come on and I become a complete nana.’ Julian Macdonald, one of Kylie’s favourite designers, also testifies to her ability to step in to the persona of a star. ‘When Kylie puts her shoes on,’ he says, ‘she clicks her heels three times, like Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz – and then she’s got that special magic.’

  For the record, Kylie has not had a bottom lift, a bottom transplant or any surgery at all on her bum. People who worked with her right at the beginning of her career saw her pertest asset at first hand and can testify to the fact that it hasn’t changed to this day. ‘I worked with Kylie in 1989 when she first changed her image on the videos “What Do I have To Do” and “Shocked”,’ says stylist David Thomas. ‘It got quite a lot of press coverage and it was when she was going out with Michael Hutchence. I think she was just becoming aware of different things including fashion. When I got the phone call asking me if I would like to work with Kylie I slammed my little finger in excitement and nearly broke it. I was a fan anyway and already had ideas on how I would style her but she has her own ideas although she is open to suggestions.

  ‘At the time she was becoming aware of fashion. We took her to her first fashion show in Paris. It was really exciting and we went to a Thierry Mugler show and a Jean Paul Gaultier show. The Gaultier show was really packed and the thing about Kylie is you always want to protect her. I basically picked her up, slung her over my shoulder and carried her through the crowd.’

  David has had plenty of opportunity to see that famous Minogue determination close-up, and pays fulsome tribute to it. ‘One word to sum up Kylie for me is tenacious. She works really hard and is a real trooper. But she also doesn’t forget people. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years and out of the blue I got a call from her inviting me to her birthday.

  ‘As for her bottom, it looks exactly the same as it has always done. She hasn’t had anything done to it. As a stylist you do get to see a lot of people and I know Kylie’s bum hasn’t changed. Kylie is small but she is just in great proportion.’

  ‘Kylie has been coming to our shop for quite a long time – about five years now,’ says an assistant at VV Rouleaux. ‘She is very unassuming and is absolutely minute. One time my husband was in the window dressing it and Kylie walked in – he just thought it was one of my 14-year-old daughter’s school friends.

  ‘Her bottom is not the first thing you notice about her,’ she adds. ‘It’s her smile – she is so very bright and sparkly. Although she is very quiet and knows exactly what she wants, so we tend not to make too many suggestions.

  ‘She’s very interested in interiors and I get the impression she is quite involved in doing her own outfits. She loves our ribbons and she sews herself – she’s very inventive.’

  It seems no one who has come across la Minogue has a bad word to say about her. ‘Kylie came to me in 2001 – I was recommended to her,’ says Joseph Silvestre, a hairstylist at Ze in Chelsea. ‘The first time she booked an appointment she used a different name. This woman came in, sat down and to be honest I didn’t recognise her. But when she said “Hi I’m Kylie”, I nearly died. We hit it off straight away and I did her hair all through the summer. She is wonderful as a client and as a person – very easy-going, relaxed and very easy to talk to. We talk about everything and anything – how work is going. She tells me what she is doing and we talk about the world. We’ll go through OK! magazine just like anyone else.

  ‘I’ve done her mum, Carol’s hair,’ Joseph adds. ‘They are very alike – both very down-to-earth – very normal. And although I haven’t seen her for a few months I have been in touch. When she comes in she usually has her hair in a little bun and wears jeans and a T-shirt. I try not to have the salon over full but she never requests for it to be empty. Although people don’t tend to bother her, on the odd occasion when someone has approached her she’s been delighted to give her autograph. She usually comes to the salon on her own or with her assistant either in a car or she’ll just walk down the road.

  And that famous derrière? Joseph pronounces himself somewhat mystified about all the attention it’s received of l
ate: ‘I don’t know what the fuss is about her bottom – it is a lovely bottom but all this about her having implants is rubbish. It’s so mean. I keep all the press cuttings so when Kylie comes in I ask her about some of the stories. Often she will say: “Oh I haven’t read that”, so I keep her up to date with what is being written about her. I think she reads some of what is written, though.

  ‘As for her hair she is very good. She will leave it alone if she isn’t doing anything – she is not one of these people who has her hair styled every day. She normally has lowlights or highlights keeping the underneath darkish – nothing that looks too artificial. But it all depends on what she is doing. Kylie is open to suggestions – she trusts me – but she knows what she likes and what she wants and of course I respect that.’

  Despite the year-round bronzed glow, Kylie is extremely careful with her skin. She doesn’t sunbathe, which is one of the reasons she is so enviably wrinkle free and is also a hangover from her Australian upbringing. Australians have been aware of the damage sun can wreak on the skin for much longer than the British (probably because they have so much more of it) and so Kylie covers up at all times. ‘She never goes out without factor 30 sunscreen on – even in London,’ says Carol Barnes. ‘She screams at anyone she catches lying out in the sun.’ Rather than bake herself to get a healthy colour, Kylie uses the St Tropez tan, also favoured by Victoria Beckham, topped up with Mac’s golden bronze body powder.

  But it’s Will who remains the greatest influence on Kylie’s look – and in describing it, he gives a revealing insight into Kylie’s home life. Of her brief incarnation as a cowgirl he notes, ‘That wasn’t a really conscious thing, it just stemmed from the fact that she wears cowboy hats and tiaras around the house all the time so it seemed like fun, especially with the Gucci leather bikini. She loves shoes, she has thousands of pairs, but when she’s shopping she loves vintage stuff and she’ll pick up something brilliant for 10p and have it altered to fit her, rather than a Prada or Gucci.’

  Will – who was once a theology student ‘with no intention of becoming a priest’ – is becoming as well known in his field as Kylie is in hers. He has also worked with Savage Garden, Tricky, Björk and Garbage and worked on projects for the magazines Detour, Australian Vogue, The Face and Spin but, very unusually for someone in his profession, does not see styling as the be-all and end-all of the world. ‘I mean, I love it and working with Kylie is brilliant because you are involved in the whole process, but a lot of the time you are just a glorified courier,’ he explains. ‘Theology reminds me that there is more to life than clothes and fashion can kind of suck sometimes, it can be just crap.’

  His friendship with Kylie isn’t, though. ‘If I’ve done anything for her over the last few years,’ Will says, ‘I hope I’ve given her some confidence in who she is and to stick up for herself, because she has incredible instincts. I hope I’ve also taught her to be a bit difficult sometimes, to put her foot down sometimes. My most consistent nag over the years is: trust yourself.’

  Will says that one of Kylie’s personality traits is insecurity. The woman herself agrees, but feels this is no bad thing. ‘It’s true for a lot of people, for a lot of performers,’ she argues. ‘It’s something about performance, there is no right or wrong. There you are in front of an audience, and it’s not accounting, where tables add up or they don’t. [But] You obviously have room to manoeuvre and change and that’s what I try to do.’

  She has also finally come to terms with her frizzy-haired past. ‘It’s like anyone, when you look at old pictures of yourself and you cringe and ask, “How did I ever do that?”’ she says. ‘“What was I thinking?” “What wasn’t I thinking?”’ And it was that – dare we say it – naffness in the early days that, Kylie believes, started her out as a gay icon. ‘I think it was about 1989, when I was being given such a hard time in the press,’ she muses. ‘It was not a nice time for me, but I also remember people coming up to me in the street and rather than asking for something, they would give by saying things like, “Don’t worry about what they write” or “We believe in you.” It wasn’t as if I was doing anything wrong, I wasn’t hurting anyone or lying to them, but I was being attacked for being me. For being popular and being uncool. I feel that perhaps they [the gay community] reacted to that.’

  Kylie was once asked what she considered to be her biggest fashion flop: ‘Becoming famous in the late Eighties is a pretty good start – like being on Top Of The Pops in this brocade waistcoat and a low side ponytail and these huge earrings that were like bunches of grapes!’ These days, she says, ‘I love sparkle. I do like Dolce & Gabbana a lot – they’re quite rock ’n’ roll. I just like to sling a few things together. It took me years to work out my style.’ And her favourite fashion item? ‘Some pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes. And jeans – you can dress them up and dress them down.’

  Age has not withered her, nor has custom staled her infinite variety. In fact now, approaching her mid-thirties, Kylie looks better than ever before. ‘I’m not panicking yet,’ she said towards the end of 2001. ‘It’s made me confident with my looks and image, finally. And I’ve come to accept that there are lots of different versions of me. Yes I love dressing up and being the showgirl but I also like bawling my eyes out like a six-year-old when things don’t go right.’

  Kylie is modest about being compared to Madonna. ‘Madonna is the Queen of pop and I am the Princess,’ she says. ‘I’m content with that.’ Top Of The Pops Magazine begged to differ. ‘When it comes to pop, we really should address Kylie as Your Royal Highness!’ it said. ‘So let’s roll out the red carpet and prepare for an audience with Her Majesty Minogue!’ Will Baker has yet another take on it: ‘She’s not threatening, like Madonna,’ he argues. ‘She’s not in your face, she’s a girl next door and always will be. People feel a very personal connection with her and for a pop star that’s quite hard to achieve.’ Madonna has not publicly commented on comparisons between herself and the Australia’s sexiest export, but her attitude to Kylie can be summed up by the fact that in 2001, she wore a T-shirt with Kylie’s name emblazoned across it.

  Kylie’s looks and appeal might be the result of a lot of work on the part of a lot of people, but like all the truly great stars in this photographic age, a lot of her success is down to the fact that – quite simply – the camera loves her. ‘In Kylie’s case, she had a certain spark, that something extra,’ Jan Russ, Neighbours’ casting director, commented early on in Kylie’s career. ‘Also, she photographed beautifully. The camera adores her and she has this wonderful presence that comes through the camera lens. She has an extra charisma, or whatever you like to call it. It just comes through. You see her on camera and she has this wonderful something.’

  Kylie attempts to lead as normal a life as she can. ‘People who meet me for the first time often go, “How ya doin’, Kyles?”’ she says. ‘And then you can see the horror spread over their faces when they realise they don’t know you at all. You’re not the person who lives down their street but they do know who you are. I do really ordinary things. I go down to Europa and walk home with my shopping bags, I go to the movies … people say to me, “Don’t you have a bodyguard?” And I’m like, no? Pur-lease! It’s a very Australian thing, I think. I remember when I moved to London ten years ago, it took me ages to get a cleaner because I had that attitude that you can’t have something that someone else doesn’t and you really shouldn’t have someone clean up after you.’

  Kylie is usually modest about her status as a sex symbol (although she did once announce, ‘I don’t try to be a sex bomb – I am one’). Asked in an interview on the MTV website in March how she feels about her poster adorning so many bedroom walls she said, ‘I don’t know how many walls I’m on. I’m sure I’m on a few dartboards as well. It’s always a bit of give and take. Talking about myself as a pin-up or as a sex symbol or anything like that, that’s a day job. “Her”, she’s gotta go and do it. I’ve got to deal with it when she comes home, in a state. />
  ‘I can talk a bit easier just having had these connections with people for many, many years. Back when they were kids and I was a young adult, so there must have been so many experiences that we’ve had together that I don’t know about unless I meet these people and they tell me a story. But they’re happening right now. Somewhere, someone’s having an experience with the music or looking through a magazine. I find it very touching and very nice … it humbles me, really. You know, it’s no skin off my nose to sign something for them that’s gonna make them happy, or their son, or their boyfriend or whoever.

  ‘Maybe it’s because over the years I’ve grown up in front of them. They’ve seen me do well, seen me fall, seen me making incredible blunders and embarrass-ments and I just think it makes for a strong and incredible relationship between them and myself. Years ago it was more frenzied when I would come to England, because Neighbours was on every single day and I was just thrust into the top fives of the chart all the time. I guess people thought, She might never come back, she’s from a land so far away. But these days, it just seems like we’re all a bit more grown up. They’re used to me, feel like they know me, so perhaps they don’t have to own me in the way that some other people might suffer. It’s just like, “Hey Kyles, how’re you doing?” It’s nice.’

  Well, it’s nice most of the time, anyway. ‘Some days I don’t cope with it as well,’ Kylie admits, though she adds hastily ‘very infrequently. I’ve had an instant where I’ve been crying on a street, it was a long time ago, and I was standing with a boyfriend, and we must have been having a bit of a tiff, and I was in tears on the street. Someone came up to me in the middle of this saying, “Hi! You’re Kylie Minogue! Can you sign this for me?” And I was just so … taken aback. And there’re the occasional times like that where I think, You’re not treating me like a person … This is not a sign of any manners whatsoever and I’m a bit old school when it comes to manners and stuff like that … But they know that I’m fragile sometimes.’