The white jumpsuit is the single most recognizable outfit in the history of popular music—high collar, plunging neckline, enormous belt, flared trousers, rhinestones everywhere. Every Elvis impersonator on earth wears a version of it.
But almost nobody knows where any of it actually came from — and the honest answers are Napoleon Bonaparte, a factory in Milan, and the lighting rigs of 1970s Las Vegas.
The man behind it was a designer named Bill Belew, and he only got the job by accident. In 1968, NBC was making a television special that would become Elvis’s comeback, and the director, Steve Binder, needed a costume designer. He’d previously worked with Belew on a Petula Clark show, so he rang him and asked for something unique — nothing like what Hollywood was doing.
Belew’s first idea was the famous black leather suit from that special. His reasoning was oddly practical. As he later explained, people assumed Elvis wore leather all the time, but he never really did. Denim was in fashion, so Belew’s thought was: what if I made a denim outfit in black leather? Elvis loved it. His only two conditions were that leather gets hot, and that he must be able to move.
The Art of Elvis’s Stage Wear
Then came Las Vegas in 1970, and the look everyone remembers. Belew needed fabric that could survive a man doing karate kicks on stage every night without splitting. He rang a friend who worked for the Ice Capades and discovered what figure skaters wore — a heavy stretch gabardine called “ski cloth”, made by a single company in Milan, Italy. That became the basis for every Elvis jumpsuit that followed.
Now the collar. Belew had always admired the clothes worn by Napoleon, and he thought those tall military collars would frame Elvis’s face and draw the eye to it. That’s the whole reason. He took other details from the same source — pointed sleeve cuffs, the very wide belts, the heavy embroidery and, of course, the capes.
Bill Belew’s Talks About Elvis Presley
And the white? That was pure practicality too. Stage lighting was still fairly primitive in 1970, and Belew found that white worked best. It caught the coloured lights and threw them back, giving Elvis a kind of glow on stage that no other color managed.
Belew designed for Elvis for nearly a decade, right up to his death in 1977, and his work turns up in places you’d never guess. The famous American Eagle suit from Aloha from Hawaii was his. So was the Peacock. And that dark velveteen outfit Elvis wore to the White House in the famous photograph with President Nixon? Also, Belew — it was originally designed as a Las Vegas stage costume.
So the most copied outfit in music history is a Napoleonic collar, on ice-skating fabric from Italy, in white because of the lighting. Bill Belew died in 2008. Every impersonator in the world is still wearing their work.