On Tori Amos' Style

Tori Amos is my most favourite female musician and her chameleon-like style never fails to amaze me.

I still remember how stunned I was when I first saw Amos – she was on the Under the Pink album cover looking like an angel in a simple white dress reflecting the minimalist mood of the 90s. After listening to the album I realized that her songs are anything but minimalist – they are maximalist, epic on ideas. Take the almost-10-minute song "Yes, Anastasia" which tells the life story of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia. Think of each Amos song as an interesting individual – she has conversations with her compositions – or like she said, “I have so many different personalities in me”.

Nothing is what it seems is a mantra that applies to Amos’ music and fashion styles – both demand un-sloppy observers to scratch beneath the surface, dig a little deeper. Tori Amos is not for the unquestioning.

Like her decidedly genre-defying music, Amos loves experimenting with style. With the exception of dressing as a punk in her Y Kant Tori Read years (she was in the synth pop band before going solo), she has successfully built her wardrobe around the many facets of her public persona, be it determined rebel, fierce redhead, rock goddess, nurturing mother or piano prodigy.

For her concept album Strange Little Girls (she reinterpreted from a female point of view songs by male musicians such as “Enjoy the Silence” by Depeche Mode and “Time” by Tom Waits) she dressed up as a wild bunch of personalities. Her friend fantasy author Neil Gaiman wrote short stories about each strange little girl (his book Fragile Things contains the full versions) and the late Kevyn Aucoin did Amos’ makeup. Amos reconfirmed herself as the Cindy Sherman of the music world then and there.

13 years have flown by since I first stumbled upon Tori Amos thanks to a classmate who lent Under the Pink to me for boredom-killing purposes and I am still mesmerized by all of her looks (minus Y Kant Tori Read, glad it was just a phase). Her outfit for Viktor & Rolf’s Fall 2005 Ready-to-Wear fashion show in which she performed her 15-minute (talk about epic on ideas) composition based on the Song of Solomon was heart-stoppingly good. She looked better than any of the models of the show, even those with lovely pillows framing their head.

Tori Amos had fellow fashion icon Grace Coddington mesmerized

Red, red, red

Raisin girl

A piano prodigy, Amos began composing on the instrument from the tender age of five