Will This Be My Cher Summer?
I want all of the sequins, the rhinestones, the vintage lamé—and the Cher-like confidence to wear them proudly into any room I choose.
Reported by Vogue.
A $60 pair of sparkly black Bob Mackie cigarette pants from a New York thrift shop will do things to a person. Specifically: make her rethink the entire premise of "appropriate summer dressing." According to Vogue, the find — scored at Cure Thrift Shop in the East Village, alongside faux fur kitten heels in Rome and a polka-dot tea service in Brașov — sparked something less about vintage fashion and more about a full philosophical pivot toward maximum visibility.
The pivot has a name, and it's Cher. Not Cher as costume, but Cher as conviction — specifically her 2013 New York Times quote about her notorious Bob Mackie look at the 1986 Oscars: "I'm going to look like I am. I'm going to be who I am. I don't care if they like how I dress... Camp is in the eye of the beholder." For a woman who watched the fashion world spend decades telling her what she couldn't wear, that quote lands differently than it does in a mood board caption.
Sequins Are Not a Compromise
Fat women have been handed the same tired script forever: neutrals, basics, nothing that draws the eye. The logic is that invisibility is safety. But the more honest read? It's a dare to take up less space than you're owed. Choosing sequins, rhinestones, vintage lamé, and Bob Mackie cigarette pants over the prescribed uniform of "flattering" isn't trend-chasing — it's a refusal. The best purchases, after all, are the ones that hold the potential for reinvention, and reinvention looks less like a new silhouette and more like finally stopping the apology mid-sentence.
And then there's the other Cher lesson: the relationship with music executive Alexander "AE" Edwards, decades her junior, that the internet couldn't stop clutching its pearls over. Whether or not it lasts, the image of a woman in her 70s refusing to negotiate her desires downward is genuinely instructive for anyone — single, 30-something, or otherwise — who's been quietly encouraged to want less, expect less, and dress accordingly.
This summer, the assignment is gold halter tops, bedazzled linen, and the specific confidence of a woman who knows the beadwork is impeccable and doesn't need you to agree — because the best thing Cher ever taught us is that dressing for yourself isn't rebellion, it's just the only option worth taking seriously.
Read the original at Vogue.
