Not everyone has always been a fan of Dolly Parton’s glamorous style.
The country music icon, 77, recalled receiving physical and verbal punishment from her grandfather for modeling her now-famous look after the local “town tramp” while growing up in Tennessee. “I’m very sensitive, I didn’t like being disciplined,” she revealed in an interview with The Guardian published on Monday, October 9. “It hurt my feelings so bad to be scolded or whipped or whatever.”
Her style of choice was something Parton said she was “willing to pay for,” accepting the punishment from her grandfather, who was a preacher and sharecropper. “Sometimes there’s just that part of you that’s willing, if you want something bad enough, to go for it,” she added.
Unlike her grandfather and others in her hometown of Sevierville, Parton admired the “town tramp” from a young age for her beauty and “flamboyant” fashion choices. “She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful,” she told the outlet. “When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’”
While Parton is widely recognized for her sky-high blonde hair, glitzy fashion and large chest, she noted that her look actually comes “from a very serious place.” She explained, “That’s how I thought I looked best. Sometimes that’s worked for me, sometimes it can work against you. It took me probably years longer to be taken serious, but I wasn’t willing to change it, and I figured if I had the talent, it’d show up sooner or later.”
However, it was her mother who always taught her to be “true to myself,” a phrase Parton said she’s “put a lot of stock in” over the years. “Everything I do, whether it’s my personality, how I conduct myself and business, or whatever, if I do it my way, according to what I understand and believe, there’s a strength in that,” the Grammy winner shared. “You can think, ‘I can stand by this, I can live by this.’ But I never cared so much that it keeps me from being me.”
Parton sported a number of dazzling looks while hosting the 2023 ACM Awards earlier this year. She walked the May red carpet in a sparkling silver jumpsuit and later traded in the ensemble for a multi-color floral dress.
In addition to donning a cowgirl outfit and dress, Parton ended the awards show by wearing a large skirt featuring a map of the world while performing “World on Fire” off her upcoming album, Rockstar, which comes out next month. The large skirt ripped off to reveal an edgy all-black leather look.
Parton previously admitted that she never considered herself to be “fashionable” in a 2019 interview with Vogue, going on to joke, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”
