Years later, I would stand in awe of the full costume crew who worked in a large, brightly lit space at Paisley Park. Prince’s office occupied the left wing of the top floor, and Wardrobe occupied the right. Pattern makers and cutters worked on long wooden worktables under broad skylights. Seamstresses and tailors fit clothing on mannequins with Prince’s body size. A stitching tailor perfected the smallest details, and the high priestess overseeing the whole operation tweaked and approved every outfit, making a sleeve half an inch longer or exchanging a silver button for a gold one. You knew you were walking out with something one of a kind and perfectly on point.
These were Prince’s clothes for every day, not just performing. When I was his wife, I wore his clothes and swiped his custom-made pajamas, and when I was pregnant, Wardrobe made me several cute maternity dresses with the word BABY and an arrow pointing down at my belly. He had hundreds of outfits that were meticulously made, right down to the zipper pulls, which were always special and unique. He had a lot of input in the design process. He’d tear pages from magazines and instruct the designer to re-create the bodice detail from this dress and the cuff from that shirt and a collar from something Errol Flynn wore in Captain Blood. Inspired by the movie Amadeus, he had the wardrobe staff create extravagant performance pieces in velvet and lace. The Philadelphia Story inspired great coats and big-shouldered suits. The wardrobe staff was incredibly talented—an amazing group of people who loved Prince and loved doing what they did. Fabulous clothes were constantly being created and re-created, vamped and revamped, altered, tailored, embroidered, and deconstructed for video shoots, performances, or just moving around in real life.
There was no “casual Friday” at Paisley Park. Prince expected us to come dressed to play, and these amazing people helped make that possible for me. They also made it possible for my husband to steal my clothes—and not in a good way. If I bought a pair of amazingly cool tailored pants or a hot jacket, he’d take them to Wardrobe, have the pants hemmed up, and tell them to put shoulder pads in the jacket so he could wear them. A few days later, I’d pull on my brand-new pants, find them two inches too short, and say, “Hey! Why are my pants shrinking?” He thought this was hilarious. And somehow he rocked these outfits just as well as I would have.
The music in Purple Rain defined the summer of 1984. I spent dozens of hours dancing to it on my grandmother’s tile floor. In Puerto Rico and back home, the singles—“When Doves Cry,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” and the rest—dominated radio and MTV. Prince was now a bona fide superstar. You’d hear that opening vocal grind from “Doves” as people washed their cars. “I Would Die 4 U” banged from open windows as you walked down the street.
The music spoke to me, certainly, but beyond that was the emotional impact of something very intimate Prince was able to share in Purple Rain: what it is for a child to witness the psychological warfare between his parents. This was something I could definitely relate to, something that connected him and me in that moment and later on, when we envisioned the sort of parents we wanted to be. We both loved our parents, but we wanted to break that cycle of crazy, dysfunctional behavior. We wanted to be a united front, committed to loving each other and creating a tight, semitraditional family unit. This vision of family is a world away from The Kid climbing in the window of his basement sanctuary, but throughout the movie and the music, you can feel his yearning for it.
I watched Prince’s very first television interview (not counting one painfully awkward American Bandstand moment when he was nineteen) on a bootlegged MTV tape Grandma Nelly recorded in 1985, the year after Purple Rain. It seems unthinkable in the present age of social media. Everyone has their “platform,” and fans expect to be fed a steady stream of witty banter and smiling selfies. He had a belly dancer’s sense of mystery; he said everything he wanted to say through his music. So this MTV interview was a huge deal. All eyes were on Prince, who was famously reclusive, shrouded in Victorian lace and artistic mystery. I watched the tape over and over until I could practically recite it word for word.