Joan Collins: ‘I still have Chanel earrings I stole from Dynasty’
She’s known for shoulder pads and sequins, but when she’s off duty you might find her in — gasp — tracksuit bottoms. The fashion icon shares eight decades of style secrets
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Joan Collins wearing pieces from her own wardrobe, at the Savoy, London JAMES D KELLY |
“Oh, you look great,” she says, as I remove my coat. She’s not saying this to flatter me. I don’t imagine Joan Collins ever does anything to flatter anybody.
Thanks, I say, I dressed up for you.
“Ha. I didn’t dress up for you,” she says.
And I know we’re going to get on.
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ALAMY; GETTY IMAGES |
Joan Collins: star of stage, screen and Dynasty — she first acted professionally at the age of nine in A Doll’s House, her most recent film credit is for 2022’s Tomorrow Morning, and she’s preparing for the tour of her one-woman show, an onstage memoir called Behind the Shoulder Pads. Aching beauty, OG diva, She has summoned me over on a rainy Saturday (it had to be a Saturday, but since it’s Joan, obviously I said yes) because . . . “We’re gonna talk about clothes, right?” she says. Her accent is thespian posh with a transatlantic twang. No one else on the planet could get away with it.
We are, I say.
“Good. I love clothes.”
In addition to everything else, Collins is probably the world’s longest-standing style icon. She has been photographed for 70-odd years, as an ingenue, a fully fledged TV star, a regular of red carpet and Oscars afterparty type events. She rose to international fame as Dynasty’s Alexis Colby (formerly Carrington), and in doing so became synonymous with the most decadent, sequin-bedazzled chic known to the 1980s.
Has she always loved clothes?
“I loved clothes from the time I was 12 or 13 — but I didn’t have any. They didn’t have clothes for teenagers, so I wore drab dresses from Bourne & Hollingsworth [a department store on Oxford Street], but I had very glamorous aunts, about ten of them. I designed outfits for my aunts. I would draw outfits and say, ‘You know, you must wear pink and black. A black suit with a pink lining and a pink pussycat bow.’ But I had no clothes. When I first got married, on my 19th birthday [to the actor Maxwell Reed, who, she has since revealed, drug-raped her on their first date; in keeping with the twisted morality of those times she felt obligated to marry him], the man I was marrying, he said, ‘Well, this is your cupboard.’ All I had to put in it was a black sweater and a skirt.”
This was the early 1950s, and Collins — who had studied at Rada at 16 and been signed up by the Rank Organisation a year later — was beginning to require outfits for “pin-up pictures”, the sexy publicity shots produced by film studios of their in-house ingenues. “My first pin-up pictures, I’m wearing a black sweater in one, a white thing in another, and a flowery outfit. All cast-offs from my aunts. They were all glamorous.”
Collins began shopping in earnest for her own clothes when “I went to America. I was 20. The shops! There was [the luxury department store] Bonwit Teller, Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue. In LA there was a place called I Magnin and it was heaven. Heaven! And there was a place called Jax.” She spells it out for me: “J. A. X. And that was where everybody went for capri pants. I adored my capri pants. Either blue gingham or pink gingham with a matching shirt. So that’s when I started buying clothes. I black-belted in shopping, I think. Haha!”
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JAMES D KELLY |
Did she wear a lot of designer?
“Schiaparelli and Balmain and Chanel? I could never afford that.”
I suppose it didn’t matter, if you looked as incredible as you did, I say.
“I never really thought that about myself.”
Really? “No. When I was 18, I was voted the most beautiful girl in England by a photographers’ association. They called my father and said, ‘What do you think about Joan being voted [most beautiful]?’ And he said, ‘I’m amazed. She’s a nice-enough-looking girl, but nothing special.’”
JAMES D KELLY
It wasn’t until she was cast in Dynasty in 1981 — a soap opera that was, at the time, struggling to find viewers, but which would become an international hit, in no small part thanks to Collins’s work — that she, by then in her late forties, finally “started to get the idea I might be pretty good-looking.” Although: “I got a lot of nasty remarks, actually. People came to interview [co-star] Linda [Evans] and me, and they’d say things like, ‘Linda is absolutely beautiful and Joan is quite plain, really.’”
I ask how she feels about the revival of Eighties fashion, and the part she has played in that — but she tells me I’m mistaken. “I don’t see people wearing it. I was just driving down the Kings Road, and everyone’s in the same type of straight jean and an anorak.” What was she doing on the Kings Road? “We went to Marks & Spencer. I’m an ambassador for Marks & Spencer’s food, which I love. I flipped through the clothes, found a bra, actually, and some little T-shirts.”
How does Collins shop these days? She says she doesn’t have time for it, although: “I do go shopping in St Tropez” — where she has the second of her three homes, the last being in LA —“for silk kaftans.” Mostly, she says, she designs her clothes herself. “I just sketch and sketch on anything. I’ve got a great dressmaker, I’m not telling anybody her name.” In case someone steals her away from you? “You said it. I didn’t. I love going to Joel & Son [a fabric shop in north London] and Beverly Hills’s Silks & Woollens.”
You shop for your own fabrics?
“Yes! How about that?”
Collins has designed all the dresses she will wear on the Behind the Shoulder Pads tour, she tells me. “There’s a dress in gold sequins. I told the dressmaker, I said, ‘I really want this to look Dynasty-ish.’ Because I think that’s what my audience would like.”
As for the tour shoes: “Chanel. I bought them three years ago, just before Covid. They match exactly the gold [of the dress]. Big platform. Very high.”
Collins tells me she rarely dresses down — “Oh, at home, yes, if I’m going through the bookshelves. I don’t know about a tracksuit. Trackie bottoms and a T-shirt? Yes. But a tracksuit is a no” — and that she adores turbans. “Love them!” For the glamour? “Because I don’t have to do my hair.” She tells me about the time she went to an Erdem show at London Fashion Week: “We got caught in the lift! Do you remember, Alex?” And that she’s “not averse to buying things at Target. I love Target. You know Target?”
The cheap US clothing chain? Of course. What was the last thing she bought there?
“A leopard-skin bathing suit, which I photographed on Instagram — $28. It got so many likes — everybody thought it was Dolce.”
I tell Collins I assume she must get some wonderful freebies.
“No! I’m not Cara Delevingne!” Delevingne is one of her 15 godchildren. “Oh, when I was doing Dynasty I would go to Paris sometimes, for Dior. I knew [Gianni] Versace very well. Versace gifted me with several beautiful things that I still have. A black leather jacket covered in big gold coins. A felt crossover skirt with a huge embroidered dragon on it, which I still have. Several jackets, which I have . . . You know, they say if you have something and you haven’t worn it for a year, get rid of it? I don’t believe in that.”
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Does Percy ever buy her clothes?
“He bought me the most fabulous pair of vintage Chanel earrings, which I wanted. I saw them in a picture about a year and a half ago and he sourced them. Big hearts, with pearls all around them. Wow. Actually, I have a collection of vintage Chanel earrings that I stole from Dynasty. It wasn’t so vintage then.”
If it all sounds like a lot of fashion admin, she has a dresser called Chrissy, who, I understand, captivated the crew on Collins’s Style shoot. Apparently Chrissy was the only person on set allowed to touch Collins’s clothes. “I’ve worked with her for about 25 years. I was doing a play at the Old Vic and she was the dresser.”
You liked her, so you took her — like the Chanel earrings?
“I didn’t ‘take’ her! She has her own life! She wants to be taken! She’s very good. She was just with Diana Ross and they wanted her on the Madonna tour, but she took [my tour] just before, luckily, because Madonna is sick. What’s wrong with her?”
I think it was some horrible infection, but I understand she’s getting better.
“What do you think of her face?”
Madonna’s?
“Yeah.”
Collins, I think, is talking about the aesthetic work Madonna is supposed to have had done.
Um, it’s . . . quite a lot, I say, tentatively (because no one wants to judge another woman’s work).
“Ha! A lot! It’s a lot of face!”
She tells me she works out — “I have to!” — then, having checked out my arms: “You obviously do. What?”
Pilates mainly, I say.
“When I did Pilates I had the most fantastic figure. Jane Seymour and me were the first people to do it in Hollywood.”
Finally, I ask her to name other women whose style she admires. She pauses for a very long time.
“Umm . . . Right now? Uh . . . Um . . . There’s got to be somebody. . . Kate! Princess of Wales! But in terms of actresses? Absolutely no one. Let me ask you, whose style do you admire?”
I pause for a while too. Then I say: when Jane Birkin died and people were posting pictures of her on social media, I realised she’d had an influence on my style.
“Oh, I didn’t like her style at all! Too bohemian! Far too bohemian.”
After which Collins tells me I’ve had enough time with her (true in terms of quotes given, really not at all in terms of how fun she is to be around), expresses dismay at my intention to travel home by Tube — “You didn’t even drive?” — tells me I should come to the show and waves me off into still-rainy Belgravia with a Dictaphone full of joy, rebukes and very smart asides.
Behind the Shoulder Pads UK tour, October 1-24, amickproductions.co.uk
Styling: Flossie Saunders. Hair and make-up: Alyn Waterman. Dresser: Chrissy Maddison. Special thanks to the Savoy hotel, London WC2
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