Bill Belew put Elvis in black and switched everything else off.
By 1968 Elvis Presley had spent most of a decade making films. The records kept selling, but the man who had shaken American television in the Fifties had not stood in front of a live audience on TV in years. NBC offered him a special. It was a comeback, and it was a risk.
On 11 June 1968 Elvis sat down with costume designer Bill Belew to talk about what he would wear. What came out of that meeting is one of the most recognisable garments in the history of popular music: a black leather suit.
Taking things away
The special had other looks, but the one everyone remembers is the simplest. Black leather, jacket and trousers, a high collar, nothing else. No sequins, no orchestra in shot, no set to speak of.
Belew understood something about leather and light. A dark leather surface swallows the glare of studio lamps. The background disappears. What remains is the outline of a body and the way it moves. In a medium that flattened everything into grey, Belew gave the camera one thing to follow.
The result was not a costume that added a character. It removed every distraction until only the performer was left.
A suit that moves
There is a practical side to this too. Elvis did not stand still. He sat on the edge of a small stage, got up, turned, leaned into the microphone. A stage suit has to survive all of that, take after take, under hot lights.
Leather does. It follows the body without collapsing, keeps its line at the shoulder and the knee, and doesn’t wrinkle into a mess when it’s sat in. It also changes with every movement: the light runs along a seam, catches a fold, slides off a sleeve. On television, that small play of reflections is what makes a black figure look alive instead of flat.
After 1968
The special aired on NBC on 3 December 1968 and relaunched Elvis’s career. Belew stayed with him for the rest of it.
The Seventies brought the jumpsuits, many of them white, as Belew later explained, because white let the stage lights find Elvis in a huge arena. The American Eagle jumpsuit he wore in Aloha from Hawaii in 1973 became just as famous as the leather suit, with embroidery by Gene Doucette. Belew also dressed Gladys Knight, The Jacksons and the Osmonds, but his name stays tied to one client.
The black leather suit is still on display at Graceland. More than half a century later, it’s still the reference anyone reaches for when they want to show that one material and one colour can carry a whole show.
Black is never just black
For a tannery, the lesson of 1968 is technical as much as cultural. Black is the colour that seems simplest and is hardest to get right. A black that is too flat looks like a hole on screen. A black that is too glossy becomes a mirror and loses the silhouette. Between those two extremes there is a whole range of surfaces, and each one does something different with light.
That is exactly the idea behind Track 05 of our FW27/28 collection, THE ALBUM: four blacks, four surfaces, the same note played on different instruments. Some hold the light, some break it, some throw it back.
When a design team asks us for “black”, that’s where the conversation starts, not where it ends. Bill Belew knew it in 1968. A black can be a directing decision.