(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros. Records / National Portrait Gallery)
Tue 20 January 2026 23:00, UK
Prior to becoming the enchantress of Fleetwood Mac and later, breaking free into her own mystical realm as a solo songstress, Stevie Nicks performed with her then-partner, Lindsey Buckingham, joining his psychedelic rock band Fritz on vocals in 1967, and was once an opening act for Janis Joplin, shortly before her death in 1970.
At just 18 years old, as Nicks watched her perform, she glanced out into the audience, where one girl caught her eye, wearing a “mauvy pink” chiffon skirt and tall, cream suede boots, with a Gibson Girl hairstyle decorated with pink ribbons. It lit a spark in Nicks, who claimed in 1981 that seeing that girl, “I thought, that’s it“, and unbeknownst to her, the girl would permanently alter the artist’s approach to fashion.
While Nicks does not explicitly accept the title of ‘witch’, though her looks onstage mirror a particular type of glamour magick, a channelling of energy that acts as an armour. Just as much as her spellbinding songs continue to captivate audiences, her style persists with a timeless resonance across generations, with her live shows truly resembling a witches’ coven, involving glittering shawls splayed across shoulders, long skirts and bell sleeves flowing, and textures of lace, velvet, chiffon and silk.
“I dreamed only about giving a little fairy tale to people,” she responded to High Times in 1982, when asked where her fascination with witches came from, “That’s what the outfit is on my album cover [Bella Donna]… With my clothes and the things that I wear, I have so much fun with them.”
On the cover of Bella Donna, Nicks wears an all-white chiffon draping, balanced on staggeringly high white heeled boots (a necessity for her 1.55m frame), with a white bird poised on her hand. Working with her longtime designer Margi Kent, she realised an artistic vision that was years in the making, similar to the outfit that she wears on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, the latter being in black.
“It’s a strange turn around that I’ve come from black to white,” she said, and later, in 2001, she likened the two outfits to the one worn on the cover of 2001’s Troubles in Shangri-La, her back turned to the camera in a wave of orange-hued chiffon.
“It’s a timeless outfit, and it has made my life much easier because I don’t ever have to think about it,” she said to 96.1 WSRS in 2001.
When Nicks first began performing with Fleetwood Mac in the mid-1970s, she was overcome with stage fright and, to counter her fear, she decided she needed a uniform for touring. She advised Kent to design a rotating collection, “Something urchinlike out of Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities”, she described, as quoted in The New York Times. Charles Dickens’ influence is seen in Nicks’ standard look of the era of a leotard, a chiffon wrap blouse, small jackets, skirts and high boots, which, she enthused, “gave us our edge”.
Wielding a carefully curated look that conjures both comfort and power, her spectacular songwriting visions are amplified in her persona. “I’m timeless,” she asserted to USA Today in 1991, “I got that Dickensian, London street-urchin look in high school. I’ll never be in style, but I’ll always be different”.
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