Inimitable... Amy Winehouse. Photograph: Gareth Cattermole
Heat magazine has it in for Amy Winehouse. This week, after an Angelina Jolie interview (bumped to the back in favour of Jade's red-eyed apology), there's a page of paparazzi photos headlined: Oi Winehouse, You Need A Wash!
Yet - laying her much-discussed music to one side - the page has plenty of evidence to suggest that Amy is in fact the most stylish pop star we have. In one picture, a pinkish support bandage barely covers her left nipple while she clutches a half-full bottle of Disaronno to her chest. Had this been vodka, or whisky, or a fruit smoothie, this outfit would have failed. As it is, her choice to accessorise with Amaretto at three in the afternoon raises the bandage and PE shorts to catwalk status.
Backcombed, she looks windswept, but swept by a storm from 1966 which has picked up the smells and smears of every teary pop star who walked before her. There's groomed, there's artfully dishevelled, and there's grubby. Amy Winehouse, with her crayoned on tattoos and never-ending eyeliner takes tousled to the next level.
Winehouse doesn't do pretty. She knows that natural makeup is for the timid and meek, so extends her eyeliner so far it becomes eyebrow. Nobody can pull off a ripped Mickey Mouse T-shirt or vomit-stained pleather like Winehouse. Her breasts heave, her hips chafe, her voice curls round one glinting facial piercing like a ribbon dancer.
Or are her soulful jocals (jazz vocals) misleading me? Is her slept-in makeup and H&M chic the sign, simply, of a girl who smells of Silk Cuts and sorrow, and too many mornings spent mopping up the friendships, bottles and boyfriends smashed? Amy Winehouse: style icon, or soap dodger?
