Stacia Lang arrived at Paisley as a patternmaker in spring 1990 after working for a decade in New York in indie theater and on Broadway. “I finally said, ‘Prince, I am going to send a ruler over so that when you say one inch we know what you are talking about.’ We had to set some ground rules.”

Helen Hiatt, the brilliant wardrobe mistress who worked on various aspects of Purple Rain and Sign o’ the Times before overseeing the entire studio for Lovesexy and Graffiti Bridge, remembers that she would very occasionally be granted a fitting with Prince. Jim Sherrin, the talented tailor who came to Prince from Guthrie Theater in the early ’80s and made all of those definitive slender-trouser looks, never touched the artist. There was a mannequin made in his size as Prince himself did not, as a rule, do fittings. In the meantime, the clothes would keep coming: Nehru jackets, matador boleros, skinny-hipped pants with a smidgen of flare, asymmetrical lapels, and single-suspender onesies, all rendered in variations of four-ply silk charmeuse and dupioni (internationally sourced through mail order).

He would respond with sticky notes of approval or further instruction (“let’s do these in fuchsia and black, too” “make these charms like Mayte’s purse”), and two weeks later, the process would begin again. The designers and tailors who worked for him communicated primarily through their drawings, which were interpretations of a general brief he’d thrown out (Barbarella meets the Godfather, say), and these sketches were placed in a binder with fabric swatches for his review. At one time, these rooms housed Prince’s in-house atelier, a full-service tailoring shop that made virtually everything he wore at the height of his fame and certainly everything worn by him and the Revolution in live performances and on film. But mostly, the clothes and accessories are wrapped in acid-free tissue and are packed in boxes, kept for eternity with the original sketches attached in a nearby binder.Īnd there are many, many, many binders. (There are four archivists in total.) Some of Prince’s most iconic looks are on display on mannequins throughout Paisley’s public areas when we visited last winter, some were on loan to the O2.

Bethany Hopman and Rebecca Jordan, who hail from Pennsylvania and Maryland, respectively, spend their days preserving and cataloging the thousands of jumpsuits, trenchcoats, high-waisted trousers, silk blouses, Lurex tunics, man heels (600 pairs thus far), pendants, and pj’s that constitute one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll closets of all time. On the second floor of Paisley Park, atop the “little kitchen” and just past the elegant dovecote wherein resides Majesty and Divinity, two archivists tirelessly attend to the fashion archives of the performer formerly and forever known as Prince.

The prince's dressmaker