Dolly Parton’s voluminous hair and rhinestone-festooned outfits were so essential to her fame that her quips about her appearance have become almost as well-known as her lyrics.

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap” is perhaps her most memorable quotation, and is typical of the self-depreciating wit she employed to talk about her appearance.

She wrote about her style in her songs, too, from her 1967 hit Dumb Blonde to 2008’s Backwoods Barbie, though in reality there was nothing cheap, or dumb, about her image. With huge blond status wigs – Tennessee by way of the court of Versailles – a fondness for glitter and high heels and tightly cut clothes that showed off her exaggerated proportions, she made herself as recognizable as Coca-Cola while employing and subverting the tropes of femininity and of country music.

Parton never failed to poke fun at her own appearance. Her hair was a “fire hazard”, she would say, or “I’m not a fashion icon; I’m an eyesore” – but her look was highly deliberate. Never once did she waver from the aesthetic she described to Allure in 2020 as “gaudy, flamboyant, fun, comfortable – for me – noticeable”.

Parton grew up in poverty, in rural Sevier county, Tennessee, one of 12 children. One of her most moving songs – Coat of Many Colors – recalled that experience through her memory of the clothing her mother made for her from scraps.

She often said she modeled her look on a woman others called the “town tramp”, but who held a glamorous appeal for Parton, being one of the few women she saw who wasn’t mired in childcare and housework. She was “flamboyant”, Parton told the Guardian: “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. 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.’”

Parton’s sharecropper father and preacher grandfather hated the way Dolly looked, and she was punished for it. In her 2023 book, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, she wrote that her appearance was a bone of contention at the beginning of her career too. When she got her first record deal, Fred Foster, the boss of Monument Records, wanted “to change my style into a 1960s pop look”. “They wanted to flatten my hair. They wanted me to look more chic and wear more streamlined clothes. I hated everything about it. I felt naked.”

He wasn’t the only one telling her, at the time, “you look more like a hooker than you do a singer.” But she told them, she said: “I’ve got great ideas and I’m a creative person. I think I’ve got something more to sell than just the way I look.”

Her look often meant that people didn’t take her seriously, she said – particularly men who would think “I was as silly as I looked”.

She felt that her career took longer to take off because of this – but it became an advantage in business because, as she said in 2009: “By the time they think that I don’t know what’s going on I done got the money and gone.”

Prevailing trends sometimes influenced her look – there were skintight bedazzled jumpsuits and platforms in the 1970s; in the 1980s she flirted with shoulder pads, but as with any style, she would “Dolly-ize them” and add her own personal spin.

One of her collaborators, designer Steve Summers, the creative director of the Dollywood atelier for decades, said it was clear who was in charge. “Dolly created the image,” he said. “She laid out all the ground rules. I just followed them.”

As a 5ft-tall woman, she said, her look was partly an effort to “fill my space”. That often meant high heels (reportedly she even wore high-heeled golf shoes) and ever mushrooming hair. She amassed a collection of hundreds of wigs, which she joked about constantly. “People would ask me how long it took to do my hair, and I’d tell them: ‘I don’t know, I’m never there.’”

She knew the power of a good fashion quip, telling Andy Warhol in 1984 that she never left “a rhinestone unturned”. She leaned into the kitschiness of her look (throughout the entire Christmas period, for example, she said, she would wear “Christmas clothes” – whether bedazzled sweater or sexy Santa outfits). Her style launched 1,000 drag impressions, delivered with a wink which broadened her appeal beyond the serious country scene.

At the same time, there was a sincerity to her look. She told the Guardian in 2023: “My look came from a very serious place. That’s how I thought I looked best. Sometimes that’s worked for me, sometimes it can work against you.”

She was often self-deprecating about her appearance, saying that she had “short little hands, so of course I’m gonna have long nails. I’m short, so I wear high heels. And my hair don’t do what I want it to, so I wear wigs.” And: “So you just kinda have to look at all your faults and try to make ‘em as positive as you can.” And, always, “I like to think that I, I might be artificial, but I’m real where it counts, right here in my heart.”

She said her wigs were actually helpful because her hair was so damaged from all of the bleaching. “I can have a hairdo of any kind anytime I want it … they’ve just served me well through the years,” she told Allure.

Otherworldly as it was, there was a relatability and vulnerability to the visible artifice of pneumatic blond bombshell armor. It was yet another way in which she was absolutely herself – and absolutely loved for it.