Gold Hot Pants to Paul Smith: Kylie Minogue's Fashion Metamorphoses

On 20 December 1989, Kylie Minogue took control of her image for the first time. Attending the Australian premiere of her film The Delinquents, she wore a custom sequined noughts-and-crosses minidress by the Australian designers Morrissey Edmiston and a cropped blond wig. She also arrived with a new accessory: Michael Hutchence of INXS, her rock star boyfriend.

A new book argues that this moment marked the point when Minogue first harnessed the power of fashion. The volume charts her rise from Ramsay Street to global superstardom — a journey that, as the book frames it, has cleverly used fashion to transform, subvert and shock.

Before that December premiere, fashion had been something done to Minogue rather than chosen by her. There was Charlene's wedding on Neighbours, the peak-80s confection of silk taffeta and lace that belonged to her character rather than to her. There was the cover of her first album in 1988, where she posed in a topless hat, showing off cascading curls.

Those early looks, the book contends, were fashion forced on her at a time when she had no say in her image. The noughts-and-crosses minidress changed that equation. From sequins and a cropped wig to the 50p gold hot pants and Paul Smith suits referenced in the book's sweep of her career, Minogue went on to become one of pop's ultimate chameleons.

The book positions her wardrobe not as decoration but as strategy — a means of signaling each new phase of a career that has now spanned soap opera, pop stardom and global arena tours. Whether in the demure lace of Charlene's wedding dress or the shock-value gold hot pants of her later pop reinvention, the clothes have carried the message.

For readers of Arts & Voices, the book offers a case study in how a performer with no initial control over her image seized it — one sequined minidress at a time.