Eleganza returns! This one-time fave fab fashion column, as you may know, oozed away slowly in the past few years for “reasons” we don't need to recount here. So, we ask, what better way to resuscitate it than by handing it over to one-time (and current) fave fab writer/musician/all-around charismatic guy John Mendelssohn — who will go to any lengths to go to any lengths, every month?

— The Editors

Eleganza’s Worst-Dressed Acts in Rock ’n’ Roll didn’t all make the list on the basis of their clothing alone. Clothes, it must be understood, are only part of what a person chooses to wear.

Consider the case of Motley Crue. I’m into S&M as much as the next fellow, so I genuinely like a lot of their clothes. It’s The Pose—the Heavy Metal Bad Boys shtick— that I’m sick to death of. I was a teenager when The Rolling Stones first shocked the pop world. I photographed David Bowie in a dress. (That is, Dave wore the dress, I a pair of tight but masculine trousers.) I’ve witnessed every sort of debauched, depraved behavior in my years on the rock beat. But now I’m as old as the hills, and so, so weary of being asked to be scandalized by how perverse a group like Motley Crue is.

Here it is in black and white. If I see one more photograph of Heavy Metal Bad Boys sneering and pointing or making the sign of the devil (index finger and pinkie extended) at the camera, I won’t be responsible for my actions.

(Why, I’ve always wondered, is there no such thing as Heavy Metal Good Boys— you know, a rocking little outfit that doesn’t write songs about how big their genitals are, but of how rewarding it is to visit the inmates of old age homes or children’s hospitals, that doesn’t spill drinks on its fellow airline passengers, but instead offers to help overworked stewardesses collect empty glasses and soiled napkins?)

It isn’t the clothes in which MTV VJ J. J. Jackson swaddles himself that makes one yearn to see how he’d look in a very tight finger necklace. It’s the face—the wrinklenosed little smirk—he makes at the camera before commercials or The Fixx’s “Stand Or Fall.” Few things are as nauseating as the sight of a man J.J.’s age trying so hard to be cute in a way that few fellows over the age of four can pull off.

No one adored “C’mon Eileen” more than I. Nor was anyone more amused by the floppy mid-calf-length overalls in which Kevin & Ko. toured the world. But then one was hired to write this column, and it occured to one how profoundly irresponsible it was of Dexy’s Midnight Runners to outfit themselves in such a manner. What if the look had taken the U.K. by storm, and subsequently spread to these shores? What then? Well, one’ll tell you what then—the race would have died off, since no one would want to procreate with anyone else!

At least Kev and the Runners are masquerading as hoboes for effect. One shudders to think what the likes of one of those Southern guitar armies is doing it for.

Here’s a fun experiment you can conduct in the privacy of your own home. Close your eyes while a friend places a photograph of Molly Hatchet and a publicity still from the film Quest For Fire on a table in front of you. When your friend gives you a signal, open your eyes for just a wink, and then close them again. Now see if you can tell which photograph was which. It’s fun, and you’ll be surprised at how often you’re wrong!

In this day and age of Vidal Sassoontrained barbers in even the smallest cities, razors with pivoting twin heads, and inexpensive mirrors, there’s absolutely no excuse for looking as the Hatchets do. Talk about perverse! These guys, willfully gruesome as they are, could eat Motley Crue,for brunch!

You’re too young to to remember this, but after the Beatles came out, a few diehards in every neck of the woods persisted in cutting most of their hair off and putting grease in what was left. Trendier kids had every right to look through their eyelid-length Brian Jones bangs at these poor wretches with boundless disdain, for they wore the sign of having missed the boat right there atop their skulls.

Now grown up and wearing their hair in the latest, hippest mode—that is, short and greasy—they * eyeball bands like Aerosmith with the selfsame disdain. (Speaking of bands like this, never, but never trust a rock musician in little white Capezio shoes. There is no surer sign of no imagination at work.)

Speaking of diehards, Ron Wood’s haircut is an idea whose time has come. And gone. And been gone so long that it seems now never to have come in the first place.

Dale Bozzfo. Anyone who denies prurience a place of honor in the pantheon of pop deserves to be forced to have lunch with a different MTV VJ every Tuesday afternoon for Six months. One hardly objects, then, to the Bozzio woman making her tits the focal point(s) of her band’s stage show. But that multi-colored hair! That sort of thing was already corny by the spring of 1973. By 1980, when a Mike Chapmandiscovered songstress called Shandi threatened for about fifteen milliseconds to make the world forsake Debbie Harry, it was ludicrous and an embarrassment. In 1983, it’s possitively inexcusable. (And that fucking squeaking she’s so fond of! Armed only with that and J.J. Jackson’s smirk, you could depopulate a megalopolis!)

Let’s call a spade a spade. Men At Work lead singer Colin Hay’s eyes go in different directions.

Freddie Mercury’s always wanted us to wonder about his sexuality. Toward this end, he used to dress up like a raging queen in the mid-’70s, and comes on now, in his very short hair and moustache and leather trousers, like someone who’s too butch to be straight. He continues to grimace and pose as he always has, making every line seem an expression of boundless inner torment. He continues to be the most repulsive man in rock' ’n’ roll.

Well, maybe just the most repulsive Englishman in rock ’n’ roll. Now that Steve Perry and his band, the second worst in the history of rock ’n’ roll, have cut their hair to length that would have approached fashionability circa 1978, can there be any doubt that long hair for fellows will soon be very* very hep again?

1968 was the year of the Nehru collar, 1972 the year of platform shoes. Mark my words—1983, thanks to the likes of the Thompson Twins, Boy George, and Flock of Seagulls lead singer Mike Score, will be remembered as the year of the preposterous hairdo.

Mr. Score’s hair evokes the mongrel progeny of a 1959 Cadillac and a Volkswagen beetle. Mr. Score’s hair annoys me to the point at which I hope that his career, like that of his namesake, Herb Score, is prematurely ended by a line drive to the head.

But if you imagined that one would go his entire maiden column without thinking of anything real, real nice to say about anyone, you’ve got another thing coming.

One might have thought that every rock ’n’ roll look that could be invented had been invented by 1983. There’d been costume ball/thrift shop chic, as exemplified by the San Francisco hippie groups, and there’d been the Bi-Guy from Space chic of early Bowie. There’d been the laid-back casualness of country/rock superstars in old football jerserys, and Bryan Ferry in his gleaming white dinner jacket, the slovenliness of The Dixie Dregs, say, and the ultra-clean-cutness of Haircut 100. There’d been Kiss, in the most outlandish outfits possible, and Heaven 17, in the least outlandish. There’ve been more effeminatelooking groups than you could count in an afternoon, and a few who actually performed in drag.

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But there’d never been anything quite like Boy George, who, in his dreadlocks and make-up, housecoats and funny hat, is surely the most magnificently funny-looking new singing sensation since Rod Stewart. As one writes this, it isn’t even Easter yet. But there can be no doubt that, as. far as matters Eleganza are concerned, Boy’s the man of the decade to date.

And such dancing!