Bianca Jagger

There are people who happen to be stylish and people whose style is, essentially, the point. Bianca Jagger was both, which is rarer than it sounds.

She arrived in the 70s fully formed — the YSL tuxedo jacket at her own wedding in St Tropez, the white suit on her birthday at Studio 54, the Halston dresses that looked like she'd been poured into them. It wasn't studied. Or if it was, it didn't show. That's the trick.

The wedding itself is worth dwelling on. Nine months of dating, a chapel in the south of France, Keith Richards in attendance, paparazzi climbing the walls. She wore a jacket and a bias-cut skirt and no veil, because obviously. Bridal fashion has been trying to catch up ever since.

What gets edited out of the style icon narrative — because it complicates the clean lines of the story — is everything that came after. After the marriage ended she didn't do the expected thing, whatever that would have been. She went back to school in a sense, redirecting entirely toward human rights work. The Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation covers climate, indigenous rights, the death penalty. It's serious, sustained, unglamorous work. The sequins are still there in the archive photographs but they're not really the legacy.

The reason she still registers isn't the Studio 54 footage, though that helps. It's that she seemed entirely uninterested in being palatable, which in the 70s, as a woman, as a Nicaraguan woman in a very white room, took something. The clothes were part of that. So was everything else.