Between the buttons
Here, Mick Jagger’s signature androgynous look recalls 19th-century writers he loved: the dandy Baudelaire, the doe-eyed, open-shirted Romantic Shelley. There’s an echo, too, of 1847’s girlish self-portrait by the pouting, long-haired teenage Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Sympathy for the devil
It is one of the first images of Jagger created by superstar portraitist and royal photographer Cecil Beaton, while the Stones were in Marrakesh. Beaton’s establishment connections didn’t make him an obvious match for the band, yet the sixtysomething was a Morocco regular who started out photographing the bright young things of the 20s and 30s and had snapped creative rebels from Sartre to Brando.
Shine a light
Famed, according to his diary, for sizing up his subjects like livestock, Beaton remembers Jagger at this early meeting as having skin that was “chicken-breast white”, “an inborn elegance” and – in the glaring morning light – a face that was “a white, podgy, shapeless mess”.
Not fade away
Beaton’s relationship with the Stones gave his later career unexpected edge. He would go on to create some of the decade’s most memorable images of Jagger, particularly as set-photographer for the trippy 1970 gangster flick Performance.
