My dream is to one day own a suit by Nudie the Rodeo Tailor.

Not to wear, but to frame.

Because a Nudie (not to be confused with Nudie Jeans) is not just clothing, it’s art.

His most famous suits were the gold lamé outfit he made for Elvis Presley and the suit with the music notes that Hank Williams died in.

But those pieces were far from his best work: basically, Nudie Cohn single-handedly popularized the use of ornate rhinestones and detailed embroidery in country-music fashion.

If you read Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, you’ll recall my discovery of the abandoned wax figures of Nashville stars lying decimated in a basement in Nudie suits. This was an amazing George Jones suit (designed in tribute to his moonshine-drenched version of “White Lightning”) later recovered from that basement:

Whenever Webb Pierce had a number one hit, he’d have Nudie design a suit to commemorate it.  This one was for “In the Jailhouse Now”:

This suit is now hanging in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Check out the back of it, which shows Pierce cooling his heels in jail. What’s amazing about these suits is the sheer detail: notice the belt loops actually have rhinestone-decorated chain-stitched keys on them:

Later in life, Nudie enjoyed a renaissance as rockers revived his look, and asked him to design some pretty unusual elements into the suits. Here’s a suit he made for Keith Richards with UFOs on it:

But by far his most famous suit was the one he made for Gram Parsons. Besides the prominent cannabis leaves and lipstick marks, notice the naked woman on the lapel and the bedazzled pill on the sleeve:

Funnily enough, you can date a Nudie item by its label: His logo was originally a topless cowgirl. But when Nudie, who moved to America as a Russian immigrant to escape anti-Semitism as a child, converted to Christianity in the early sixties, the cowgirl suddenly got a top.

And if Nudie’s spectacularly loud clothing isn’t enough to wow you, check out one of the Nudie cars he custom designed:

It features guns as door handles, rifles on the sides of the trunk, a gearshift set on top of a leather saddle, some 350 genuine silver dollars inlaid on the interior, and massive steer horns as a front bumper.

If I could go back in time, it would be to see Webb Pierce driving that car down the streets of Nashville.  And maybe to swim in his guitar-shaped swimming pool: