The story behind Amy Winehouse’s powerfully imperfect stage style

“This is too tidy for Amy. Her bedroom never looked like that; she was so scruffy.” Janis Winehouse-Collins arrives at the Design Museum at the same time as I do, and looks around a room dedicated to her daughter’s life with a smile, while shaking her head at the neat piles of records and images of immaculate rails of colourful clothing.

The show begins with professional pictures of the then 21-year-old Amy Winehouse shot in her north London teenage bedroom – in all of them, she exudes that particular unkempt pin-up aesthetic, strutting around in low-slung leopard print trousers, little crop tops and tight-fitting miniskirts. You can see the superstar she’s turning into – although it is a wall of family photos that makes her mother stop. “Ah, there she is,” she says, pointing to an image of a little girl with chubby cheeks.

‘Amy: Beyond the Stage’ opens today in London’s Kensington and is an attempt by the Winehouse family and the Design Museum to shift the conversation away from alcoholism and drugs and towards Amy’s extraordinary voice and her era-defining style. The exhibition comes 10 years after her death and was curated by the Design Museum’s Priya Khanchandani with the help of Amy’s best friend and stylist Naomi Parry, as well as her now divorced parents, Mitch and Janis, who donated photographs, clothes and lyric books.

“I wanted people to see the real girl - my real girl,” says Mitch, over the phone. “She was one of the all-time great characters. Nobody is trying to say she was a choir girl, but she was funny and kind and brilliant. You get a sense of that here.”

As a thoughtful and emotional tribute, the exhibition undoubtedly works, although it is impossible not to look at Amy’s sky-blue guitars, slinky silk dresses, muddy ballet shoes and reams of hand-written songs dotted with hearts and not think about the tragedy of it all.

“We understand people will feel sad, but it is also so important that the exhibition was experiential,” says Khanchandani. “Not having access to Amy anymore means you can’t go and see her perform. But it was ultimately her voice and her presence as a performer that made her such a powerful figure. And her fashion was so linked into that.”

Winehouse was one of arguably very few 21st century artists whose fashion choices became (to deploy that terribly overused word) iconic. With her beehive hair style, her hourglass dresses, her winged eyeliner, her battered flats and her tattoos, she melded the ultra-feminine diva archetype with Camden street culture in a way nobody had done before. One newspaper in the early 2000s described her as “Dietrich with a nose-stud”, and that high-low mix applied to her style as much as it did to her music.

Even on Design Museum mannequins, the dresses are distinctly ‘Amy’. One tropical print number from Karen Millen worn by the singer in 2007 when performing at the Hammersmith Apollo recalls the Ronettes and Billie Holiday, while a hot pink Patricia Field mini and a Galliano newspaper-print dress both evoke the body-conscious Noughties party scene.

Underneath these perfectly preserved gingham, houndstooth and flower-print dresses are rows of flats and heels, none of which are immaculate. Covered in mud and well-worn, they look like the shoes of any young woman who has danced at festivals or walked around a big dirty city. Despite becoming a global superstar, Amy was never interested in perfection, and even when she wore elegant silk and sequin designs, they were often bought off the peg from brands like Betsey Johnson and stained and slightly broken by the end of the night.

“So many of her pieces of clothing have fake tan all over them,” exclaims her friend and stylist Naomi Parry in a BBC documentary – a perennial problem for those of us who were young in the LA-obsessed Noughties.

“She was forever hunting for new clothes,” says Mitch. “My poor mum never had a pair of shoes to wear - Amy pinched them all. And all those short skirts she wore as a teenager: I tried to make her stop but I never stood a chance.”

Global fame did, of course, attract the big brands. As the Grammys poured in, the labels in her dresses switched from Karen Millen and Topshop to Dolce & Gabbana and Vivienne Westwood – although always the same wasp-waist, short-skirt style. Fred Perry asked her to design a collection for them, and after the release of Back to Black, Amy’s beehive and hourglass silhouette became so distinct that it was worthy of imitation. Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima posed as Amy in a spring 2009 issue of Love magazine, while Karl Largerfeld chose her as his muse for Chanel’s Cruise collection that same year.

The clothes, however, never intimidated Amy, and under a display of expensive dresses are Perspex boxes filled with heart-shaped sunglasses, half-broken shoes, stained handbags and lots of oversized gold hoop earrings that look as if they’d been bought for £5 at a Camden market stall. And probably were.

It is impossible to talk about Amy’s fashion choices without referencing her body image, and while the Design Museum and the Winehouse family clearly want the focus to be on the extraordinary life she lived, towards the end of the show, the dresses are so small that even fashion journalists used to miniscule sample sizes winced during a preview of the exhibit. Khanchandani is happy to talk about Amy’s well-documented struggle with bulimia, noting that her drastic weight loss is evident from her wardrobe – but also that “her friends and family worked tirelessly to provide the support she so urgently needed”.

Equally, the Winehouse family is keen to stress that Amy had long given up drugs by that point, and hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol for six weeks until two days before she died. “She looked wonderful in that period,” says Mitch. “I have pictures from a week before her death and she was beautiful. Even in the nice documentaries they love to show that scrawny girl who people were taking advantage of. You’ve got to be joking: nobody took advantage of Amy. She was a normal young lady who had an extraordinary talent.”

Her father is of course a controversial figure: after the release of the 2015 Asif Kapadia film, Amy, which portrays him as pushing his daughter to breaking point in his own obsession with success, Mitch says he came close to collapse. He collaborated on a BBC documentary, Reclaiming Amy, in an attempt to redress it and Khanchandani – who has worked closely with the family to build this exhibition describes father and daughter as “very close”. Both point to the important work the charity the Winehouses set up in her name has done for young people with addiction issues.

It is impossible for the rest of us to ever fully understand what happened in those last years, but the intimacy of this exhibition certainly does bring Amy back to life. The most moving part of the entire show is arguably the finale: a light-filled illustration set to Tears Dry On Their Own where a hand-drawn young woman with a beehive in a short ra-ra dress dances across the screen. It is joyful – and very sad.