Lee W Moore
When Lee W Moore began working in fashion in the 1980s – in various roles with avantgarde Japanese designer Mitsuhiro Matsuda and French designer Jean Paul Gaultier, as well as styling music videos for Prince, among others – he could have hardly imagined he would become one of the top stylists in country music three decades later. But Capitol Records’ Nashville executives came searching for someone to put a new spin on their artists’ style in the early 2000s, and Moore turned out to be the perfect fit.
Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Moore understood the South while having spent enough time in the fashion circles of New York and Los Angeles to obtain a global perspective. “Outside Nashville, people would come with a lot of preconceived stereotypes of what country music was and what it looked like,” he says. “Most of those notions were quite corny.” Big-city stylists would pore over the runway collections and pull everything with “rhinestones, cowboy boots and hats. Nashville people would say, ‘What is this? We don’t look like that’.”
Moore has dressed everyone from Keith Urban, whose vibe skews more towards rock ’n’ roll than country, to Sam Hunt, who is bold enough to wear a full pink suit on the red carpet. Nowadays, outfitting his megawatt client Luke Bryan is a full-time gig thanks to the singer-songwriter’s multiaward-winning run and his role as a judge on American Idol. Bryan’s goto suiting brand is Tom Ford. “It fits him off the rack perfectly, like it was made for him,” he says. “That saves us an incredible amount of time.” A watch collector, Bryan is also known to sport Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Roger Dubuis, Richard Mille, Cartier, Vacheron Constantin and Breguet.
Moore, perhaps not so coincidentally, is also into timekeepers – he owns a Patek Philippe Nautilus that he found in a vintage shop in Milan. “It’s this tremendous flex to have this,” he says. “I tried so many times to get people into this watch. Nobody was interested until a few years ago. Now you can’t buy one anymore.”
While T-shirts and jeans are still the preferred uniform in country, not just any denim and tees will do. Country artists “perform together, they collaborate, they write together and they hang out together”, says Moore. “So they 100 per cent see each other’s stuff and you’re trying to have a unique brand.” He scours the globe for labels unavailable in the US. Moore has an eye for subtle differences, such as a white T-shirt with an unusual neck binding or a new sleeve, and he even buys outsized jeans for the colour of wash or fade and then remakes them for his clients. “There is a lot of jeanshaping in my life.” Recently he spent two months travelling around Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and Turkey and took time to search for rare finds. “I’m a compulsive hunter-gatherer,” he says. “I buy it all because sooner or later, somebody’s going to need it.”
“Outside Nashville, people would come with a lot of preconceived stereotypes of what country music was and what it looked like.”