He talks about the heavy influence the Beats had on him, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and Corso, and especially the sway of Woody Guthrie: "Woody's songs were having that big an effect on me, an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed ..."

Dylan also writes about what he wore to a party on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park, and what it said about who he thought he was and what others thought, too: " ... I didn't feel out of place, not too much. I was wearing a thick flannel shirt under a sheepskin jacket, peaked cap, khaki pants and motorcycle boots ... They could tell I wasn't from the North Carolina mountains nor was I a very commercial, cosmopolitan singer, either. I just didn't fit in."

In 1965 in London, Dylan fell hard for the polka-dot shirt. He wore fitted, button-up ones, but billowy, filmy androgynous ones too, and more than any other item, these have been a sartorial mainstay. (He wore one on the cover of his 1994 "Unplugged" album.) There's even a Dylan site called new-pony.com that has an entire photo gallery devoted to him in his beloved polka dots.

"I think he was trying to look like he didn't care," says Rolling Stone's Carpenter, "but he was very aware of how he looked. It was" - as the most stylish often are - "studiously unstudied."

Biba's head designer Bella Freud agrees. She says that Dylan is one of her constant muses, not just because he references so many different people and archetypes but because he gets fashion.

"His look is so cool, and it changes all the time," she says. "When I read his book, and he was talking about how someone said, 'What should I be studying about you?' - he talked about being obsessed with Woody Guthrie, but instead of studying Woody, he studied what Woody had been studying. That was what influenced me with Biba. I thought that was really great."
But it's his '60s look - which he wrote about, fleetingly, in his memoir "Chronicles: Volume One" - that keeps coming back and getting spun different ways. It's the look he cultivated as a young, porous artist who absorbed everything he could while inhabiting downtown New York.

He talks about the heavy influence the Beats had on him, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and Corso, and especially the sway of Woody Guthrie: "Woody's songs were having that big an effect on me, an influence on every move I made, what I ate and how I dressed ..."

Dylan also writes about what he wore to a party on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park, and what it said about who he thought he was and what others thought, too: " ... I didn't feel out of place, not too much. I was wearing a thick flannel shirt under a sheepskin jacket, peaked cap, khaki pants and motorcycle boots ... They could tell I wasn't from the North Carolina mountains nor was I a very commercial, cosmopolitan singer, either. I just didn't fit in."

In 1965 in London, Dylan fell hard for the polka-dot shirt. He wore fitted, button-up ones, but billowy, filmy androgynous ones too, and more than any other item, these have been a sartorial mainstay. (He wore one on the cover of his 1994 "Unplugged" album.) There's even a Dylan site called new-pony.com that has an entire photo gallery devoted to him in his beloved polka dots.

"I think he was trying to look like he didn't care," says Rolling Stone's Carpenter, "but he was very aware of how he looked. It was" - as the most stylish often are - "studiously unstudied."

Biba's head designer Bella Freud agrees. She says that Dylan is one of her constant muses, not just because he references so many different people and archetypes but because he gets fashion.

"His look is so cool, and it changes all the time," she says. "When I read his book, and he was talking about how someone said, 'What should I be studying about you?' - he talked about being obsessed with Woody Guthrie, but instead of studying Woody, he studied what Woody had been studying. That was what influenced me with Biba. I thought that was really great."

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