NILE RODGERS FOR GQ.CO.UK

A veritable Forrest Gump of funk, Nile Rodgers has acted as a musical Zelig over the past 36 years, joining the dots between Diana Ross and Daft Punk. Responsible for dozens of bona fide dance anthems both as Chic's frontman and a producer in his own right for Bryan Ferry, David Bowie and Grace Jones, he is best known for his bold style, a brilliant musical autobiography (Le Freak) and considerable courage when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2010 (he's only just been given the all-clear). Utterly charming, what's particularly striking when speaking to Rodgers is that although he doesn't so much name-drop as casually carpet bombs cohorts, you can't help but feel that it is simply due to the extraordinary life he has led (he dates one anecdote by who his collaborator - Madonna - was romancing at the time). To mark the release of his sublime new Chic best-of Up All Night, GQ spoke to Rodgers in London's Bulgari Hotel, who offered his thoughts on sunglasses indoors, chain mail vests and Manolo Blahniks for men. 
 
My best style advice? This is going to sound really stupid but I think it's true. I used to have a television show on VH1 in the early days [New Visions] and John Lee Hooker came on my show. At the end, he pulled me aside and said, "I've got to tell you something, man. If you ever want to be cool, you always have to insist that photographers take your photos with sunglasses."
 
Here's something a lot of people don't know about me: I have a massive amount of clothing. The way that it's all been preserved is that I handwash things in cold water. Everything looks beautiful. I've got all this old Versace Classic stuff that looks like it came right off the showroom floor.
 
These last few tours I've been wearing a ton of my old suits. Some of the super-tailored stuff now has come back [into fashion]. In the early days we would have so many people working for us and we would make fabrics that would really would hold up for travel on the road. If you look at Chic from the first few album covers we had that super tailored stuff but a lot of these labels, like Rafael, don't exist any more.  I'm wearing that clothing now and it looks phenomenal. People go, "Wow, where did you get that jacket?" I go "Er, I had it made by Bill Kaiserman in 1978!"
 
My biggest style mistake would have to be some of the stuff I did in the Eighties. I'm not so sure I was thrilled with my chain mail vest. Don't get me wrong, at the time I loved it! I even had chain mail gloves, which I never wore - but I still have them in my closet.  I have a massive amount of what we now call the "MC Hammer pants", that are tapered at the ankle and very wide from the hips down. You look like you're in The King and I.
 
During the Chic era we were working with a lot of designers that would go on to become very famous - Norma Kamali, Jhane Barnes, people like this who were just right out of fashion school. A lot of people were making men's clothing and women's clothing.
 
I have a huge amount of Manolo Blahnik shoes for men. Whenever I go out a lot in my formal wear, the shoes I wear most of the time are my old Manolo Blahniks. I can't wait to take off my shoes when I'm at a black tie event and show the label inside - especially when you're next to a woman. They can't believe it!
 
There was a time when men's shoes were very stylish and that sort of has gone away. Until, I have to say, I went to Saint Laurent because of Daft Punk and I happened to notice that the men's shoes at Saint Laurent this season are unbelievable. It's back to the Maud Frizon-era that I love. For me, that's phenomenal. It's really cool because that's the kind of clothing I grew up with. Isn't it incredible that we all have our clothing made for this video shoot which is very reminiscent of that [Seventies] period but still looks really modern - if not futuristic?
 
My first clothing shopping spree was when I got a job as part of the house band at the [Harlem] Apollo. That made a big impact upon on me; I went from being very poor to having a weekly salary. Then I just went bananas. The very first thing I bought was super ridiculous: a pair of extraordinarily high platform shoes that were natural python. All of a sudden I went from being 5"10 to 6"1. I started dating these girls that were really tall. I was wearing jumpsuits or these really skinny bellbottoms that would cover the shoes except for the toe and the heel… I thought I was the coolest dude on earth.
 
When I met Michael Jackson I was completely rebellious, a total hippie, a complete fashion junkie. He was very young, quite under the thumb of his dad, that's why he and I got along so well. I was wearing what we would call the "hippie couture" of the time. I was sewing my own embroidery on my jeans and doing things that you couldn't buy in the store - when Michael saw that he thought, "Whoa that's the coolest thing ever!" We would make all these elaborate designs, all sorts of patchwork things. A lot of this stuff, when I think about it in retrospect, is like some sort of mating ritual. Seriously: all of this stuff was designed, in my case because I'm hetero, to attract the opposite sex. Your jeans would wear out in the crotch area - and we're wearing very low rise, low waisted jeans - so you'd put the patches right where you want the girls to look. It was all stratgetically done. It was all done so that a girl would walk into a room and couldn't help but look there. In retrospect, I now know that is what I was doing. At the time you'd say, "No, I'm just mending these jeans because they're torn or they're ripped." But somehow they were always torn and ripped in the exact right place.
 
I never talked about clothes with Bryan Ferry. Seeing him [fronting Roxy Music] is what made me come up with the idea for Chic but he and I have never talked fashion ever. We're just great friends - we were just together last week - and we're always checking each other out. But it's funny when he's backstage he looks like Bryan Ferry. When I'm backstage I don't look like Chic - I look like Nile! I was backstage in Guildford and I arrived and there's a bunch of chaps sitting around smoking pipes and looking very old school English in three piece suits in 90 degree heat. [Adopts British accent] "Oh hullo Bryan, how are you my dear fellow?" Public school accent guys! It was actually funny - it was like "Dudes! Are you on safari in Africa?"
 
On some level, with certain tailors, I have a love affair with the bespoke process. There's this label Earl of Bedlam, a new line coming up here in London. Their rap is that they use nothing but the finest English fabrics. I have some wonderful woollen suits. Even their T-shirts are extraordinary: there are a couple of shots of a three piece white suit [founder] Mark Wesley made for me in a magazine called Jocks & Nerds. He's making some stuff for me now - he's dying to make clothing for the girls but I don't want him to. We'll ruin them every show. We try and wear something different every performance and I hate to go through bespoke clothing - we sweat this stuff up and it's really not nice.
 
There's one item of clothing in my archive that I will probably wear once or twice more in my life.  It's a coat that was made by Issey Miyake; it would have been the winter/fall line from 1985. I have the only one that exists in the world. He invented a fabric that was going to be faux fur - when you see me walk down the street it looks like a really expensive seal coat. But what happened was he realised it was too expensive to make. It was almost blasphemous to charge that amount for a coat. When he saw me in the magazine and with the price of the coat, he felt guilty - so he gave me the coat! I met Miles Davis on that fashion shoot. Every time [afterwards] Miles saw me he would say. "Man, give me that motherf***ing coat." It is the single most prized possession I own. But when it comes to stuff like this I imagine there's a certain amount of folklore: they had to have done more than one sample. How can you just make just one?! Those [rare] fake seals… it must have been like Dolly the cloned sheep or whatever.
 
I actually like the fact that people wear whatever they like now. The other day I was in some very ritzy gig at a famous resort right outside of Paris. I noticed that half of the guys at this formal jazz festival were dressed hip-hop style, wearing their jeans below their underwear. It just showed me that now, fashion feels the same ways music felt when we first started in the Seventies. When the disco movement was so open it embraced weird guys like Chic - these jazz fusion/r&b guys who couldn't really find a foothole in the music until disco allowed us in. I wrote my first Chic record "Everybody Dance" and it was fine; nobody cared that we were these weird guys, they just liked the music. I think that's what's cool about fashion: if you can pull it off, you can walk into a fancy setting [wearing what you want].
 
My best-dressed British man? Maybe because I love him so much but Mark Ronson is really cool. Every time I'm with Mark I'm like, "Are you sure you're not my son?" About a year ago he and I were sat together doing an interview - he looked down and noticed that my trousers and socks match perfectly. He just said "You know, I can't believe it. I come to do a press conference with Nile Rodgers and he pops me with the socks!" I just thought: "No one else in the world would have even noticed it. Except for Mark."
 
By far my worst haircut was when I was "in transition". I used to have my hair in a flat top fade away - like Grace Jones was famous for - and there was a moment in the early Eighties when I was trying to figure out if I was going to go back to a gigantic electric afro. I had to put a mild relaxer in my hair to make it stand straight up. It was when I was doing the record "Why" with Carly Simon. There's pictures of she and I when I had that hairstyle that [make me] almost want to cut my head off. I actually started twisting my hair because Madonna told me I should wear dreadlocks, which I wasn't going to do. I was just going to twist it because that looked original, one day I couldn't untwist it because it had locked. It stayed that way for the last 25 years.
 
Probably at my age I shouldn't wear what I wear. But who cares? My eyes see what I love and what I love is what I've always loved.
 
Originally published on GQ.co.uk in August 2013. Read the original here.