sus
Moderator
The guy I knew in college who was closest to a Bob Dylan Lou Reed type—mysterious, "fuck you" cult charisma—always wore the same set of flannel shirts and jeans and every shirt looked vaguely the same. There was a "look" a brand and it gave him powers and it also shut him off to changing, becoming something else. And I think it was a mix of terror (which you get with Dylan, "fragile as a winter leaf" Joan called him) and defensiveness, the brand was armor the shirts were armor. But it also gave him an air of independence, of being his own distinct person, that lent him an iconicity, a cult of personality. Perhaps that's what I'm projecting onto the Dylan situation.