Barbra Streisand Talks Personal Style and Her Memoir

She flirted with Brando and even Prince Charles. She has been romantically linked with a succession of Hollywood hunks — suppose Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal.

However there are not any steamy boudoir scenes in “My Identify Is Barbra,” Barbra Streisand’s exhaustively detailed doorstop of a memoir. As an alternative, the multi-hyphenate star — singer actress, producer, director, philanthropist — lavishes consideration on her wardrobe, which she paperwork, web page after web page, down to every sparkly paillette.

Rising up, this self-proclaimed “skinny marink” from Brooklyn cherished her burgundy sweater with picket buttons that “set her aside from the opposite children on her first day at camp.”

Her near-fetishistic recall propels her into her teenagers, when each greenback she earned babysitting or working as a cashier in a Chinese language restaurant went towards garments. There was, specifically, a lace-trimmed skirt and high printed with tiny pink-and-white checks with footwear to match — “low reduce pink flats that confirmed a little bit of my toes.”

Lengthy earlier than the appearance of the movie star stylist, Ms. Streisand, 81, realized to style her picture seemingly on the premise that if she couldn’t commerce on her options to venture glamour and apparent intercourse enchantment, she might rely on her particular brew of off-center panache.

“I assume I regarded totally different, I dressed totally different,” Ms. Streisand stated in an e mail final week, a part of a uncommon interview, her first to be centered solely on style. “I by no means simply went with the model of the day. I had different photos in my head. I used to be impressed by interval movies, work in museums and people fabulous Mucha posters of Sarah Bernhardt that I first noticed once I was a young person.”

A “good Jewish woman” from Flatbush, she was achingly conscious of her otherness. “Nobody would have checked out me and thought, ‘That woman ought to be a film star,’” she writes in her memoir. “I’ve a small head, a crooked nostril, my mouth is just too massive, and my eyes are too small. Did I even suppose I used to be attractive? No.”

However as an alternative of masking that distinction, she made essentially the most of it, insistently downplaying — her sexuality. In her early days, she carried out in boyish middy shirts, quaint Victorian frippery straight from the thrift store and a masculine-feminine hybrid of males’s tweeds and filmy tie-front blouses.

For her 1960 debut on the Bon Soir, a Greenwich Village piano bar, she wore what she described within the interview as “a high-necked, long-sleeved Persian vest from the flip of the century embroidered with silver thread, over a easy black gown.”

On her second night time, she wafted to the stage in a Victorian combing jacket that she threaded with pink satin ribbon to match the Twenties pink satin footwear that, as she now remembers, “price solely $3 on the thrift store.”

The purpose was, she stated: “I didn’t relate to the traditional type of robe most nightclub singers wore. As an alternative, I took a males’s put on material — a black-and-white herringbone tweed — and designed a vest, which I wore with a white chiffon shirt and an identical tweed skirt, floor-length with a slit up the aspect, and lined in pink. I’ve been carrying a model of that swimsuit ever since.”

Ms. Streisand’s hanging originality impressed the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. “She noticed one thing in me, when different folks had been making jokes,” Ms. Streisand writes in her memoir. “She spoke of me as a style icon, lengthy earlier than I imagined I’d ever make the best-dressed checklist.” (She did make the checklist, twice.)

She did her greatest to dwell as much as that picture, perching within the entrance row at Chanel carrying a jaguar coat and matching pillbox, and taking to the stage in her signature Empire robes.

“I’ve at all times beloved that model, with a excessive waist and a fall of material to the ground,” she stated final week. “It suited my physique and gave me room to breathe once I sang.”

As her fame grew, so did her polish, together with a confidence matched solely by her chutzpah. An admitted obsessive, she mined her personal closet for a lot of of her movie roles, “The Means We Have been” and “The Prince of Tides,” amongst them.

She presumed to sketch her personal customized designs for Invoice Blass, Arnold Scaasi and their vaunted ilk. For her 1998 marriage ceremony to the actor James Brolin (sure, they’re nonetheless a pair), she directed her buddy Donna Karan to drape her in an Empire gown, although Ms. Karan talked her right into a lacy tulle confection that pooled at her toes.

Overbearing? Nit-picky? Ms. Streisand has heard all of it. “OK, so perhaps I used to be slightly hands-on,” she writes within the memoir.

She was a relentless perfectionist, however there have been gaffes — not least an notorious wardrobe malfunction. A lot to her horror, the glittery Scaasi pantsuit she wore to say her first Oscar in 1969 proved clear below the stage lights.

And he or she weathered some barbs. When she appeared at President Invoice Clinton’s first inaugural gala in a pinstripe swimsuit, a vest that confirmed off her bosom and a protracted skirt seductively slit on the aspect, one writer carped in The New York Instances that her ensemble despatched a “disturbing sign” and a “coy blended message.”

Ms. Streisand continues to be miffed. “I assumed that author was studying quite a bit into that outfit, and it stated extra about her than about me,” she stated over e mail. “Like I wrote in my guide, ‘Why can’t ladies be completed and enticing, robust and delicate, clever and sensual?’”

And gown their age? That idea eludes her. “Folks ought to categorical themselves and put on no matter they really feel on any given day,” she stated. ”And that has nothing to do with age.”

In her interview, Ms. Streisand recalled that a number of years in the past she had urged posing for a W cowl in nothing however a contemporary white shirt “and no pants.” “Simply legs,” she stated.

Early in her profession she had balked at such overt expressions of her sensuality. “I used to be too afraid to be seen that manner at the moment,” she stated. “Now I’m too previous to care.”

However by no means too previous to surrender on style or, for that matter, to cease amassing treasures. Ms. Streisand owns movie costumes, a Fortuny robe, classic garments and vintage dolls.

“A few of these dolls are 100 years previous,” she stated. “Occasionally they want a brand new pair of footwear, don’t they?” She homes lots of these artifacts in a subterranean mall at her Malibu property.

They play their half in a story that has taken her a good distance from house. The oddball from Brooklyn who refused to eliminate the bump on her nostril has morphed right into a swan. As one should.

“All of us grew up on fairy tales,” Ms. Streisand writes. “Who doesn’t love a Cinderella story?”