In 1974, decades before Ye, then known as Kanye West, packed Madison Square Garden for a twin album-fashion spectacular, Sly Stone, the cosmically groovy singer-songwriter who died Monday (June 9), offered his own extravaganza of dance, funk and flash on New York’s biggest stage. 

The occasion was a sold-out Sly & The Family Stone concert in front of more than 20,000 fans, and the centrepiece was Stone’s wedding to Kathy Silva – a gold and black display of fabulosity. 

The bride and groom (and the whole wedding party, band included) wore coordinated Halston looks. Stone wore a gleaming cape and jumpsuit, the waist cinched with a big gold belt buckle, so he looked like a cross between a disco superhero and a sci-fi lord come lightly down to Earth. 

Behind them, a dozen models in black dresses carried gold palm fronds.

It was, The New Yorker declared, “the biggest event this year”.

It was also seven years after Stone arrived on the music scene promising A Whole New Thing (the name of his debut album), and boy, had he delivered. 

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Sly Stone's style crossed genre, race, gender and audience. It offers unity in a psychedelic stew of fringe, rhinestones and lame that was sometimes celebratory and sometimes chaotic, often outrageous, but almost always impossible to forget. Photo: Instagram/Sly StoneHe introduced not just a whole new sound but a whole new kind of style to the stage. 

Like his music, it crossed genre, race, gender and audience, offering unity in a psychedelic stew of fringe, rhinestones and lame that was sometimes celebratory and sometimes chaotic, often outrageous, but almost always impossible to forget – whether it was on The Ed Sullivan Show or the Woodstock stage.

“He had a look,” Questlove, drummer, record producer, disc jockey, filmmaker, music journalist, and actor, wrote in the introduction to Stone’s 2023 autobiography, Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).

He loved an accessory: a necklace, an arm band and, especially, a hat.

He wore giant, broad-brimmed fedoras long before Pharrell Williams stepped out in his 20-gallon Vivienne Westwood number in 2014, as well as crocheted toppers and exaggerated newsboy caps – like the silver-sequinned style he wore with his magenta-sequinned shirt for a performance on The Midnight Special in 1974. 

He was his own Spaced Cowboy (the name of his song) in Nudie suits, spangled vests and wigs.

“He challenged people’s perception of normalcy,” Williams wrote in The New York Times. “He wore seriously fly clothes, and to this day, I have no idea how he walked around in those platforms.”

And it wasn’t just him; it was the whole band. 

Stone had a theory of fashion just as he had a theory of rhythm, one that emphasised the individual within the group dynamic. 

He would pick the colours for the crew – his favourites were red, white and black, which were also the colours of his living room, but within that spectrum, they were free to go their own way. 

At a time when many Motown bands still wore matching suits and ties, the idea that band members should dress to express their own bliss was revolutionary.

“Sly had the idea that we should be in the same theme, but make it be your own personality,” Jerry Martini, the band’s saxophone player, said in a video interview posted on the band’s YouTube channel in 2013.

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He also described a day when Stone, dissatisfied with whatever outfit Martini had planned, looked around, grabbed a razor and cut up a cow-skin rug for him to wear like a poncho.

The point, Greg Errico, the band’s drummer, said in the video interview, was “to be colourful”.

Not just to stand out, although they definitely did that, but “to be like (what) music is – music is technicolour”.

Stone understood the power that came from connecting the ears and eyes, and he stuck to that conviction through his struggles with drugs and the industry, as his appearance during a 2006 Grammys tribute in silver lame and a giant blond mohawk attested. 

He didn’t just sing about embracing “the skin I’m in”. He offered everyone a bedazzled primer for how that might look. – ©2025 The New York Times Company

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.