Iconic style: Patti Smith’s “Horses”

When “Horses” launched in November 1975, it didn’t just announce a new artist; it announced a new logic for how a woman in music could look, move, and speak.

In an era crowded with gloss and ornamental femininity, “Horses” offered something shockingly austere: a woman who refused every conventional demand except truth.

Patti Smith’s debut has been mythologised for its sound. Those long, incantatory lines that fused Rimbaud with punky grit was one thing, but its visual language was equally radical.

The cover photo was shot by Robert Mapplethorpe, and it could be mistaken for a lucky, yet  random snapshot – a style that inspires many fashion photographers to this day. Wearing a white men’s shirt, a narrow tie, with a black jacket thrown across her shoulder Patti Smith poses casually as if you had just caught her on her way home from a party that lasted a little too late. She looks straight at the camera, not seducing it but not yielding to it either. It’s a posture that denies objectification yet not defensive; she seems to occupy a third space that rock had not yet made room for.

Smith’s style in this photo has been recycled over and over by designers and stylists. To this day it is considered a classic fashion statement, way ahead of its time. The androgyny was not provoking but it did help carve out a space in which female performers could exist outside the binary of glamour or rebellion, virgin or vixen. Instead, Patti Smith presented an identity built on intellectual intensity, vulnerability, and a deliberate refusal of artifice. It offered an early blueprint for punk’s anti-spectacle: the rejection of excess, the prioritisation of authenticity over adornment.

Confident, yet unruly, it would echo through generations: from Siouxsie Sioux and PJ Harvey to Kim Gordon, Florence Welch, and countless others who learned that personal style could be a form of authorship.

To this day, “Horses” still feels contemporary, not because it predicted punk or influenced fashion, though it did both, but because it articulated something timeless: that identity can be self-constructed, self-defined, and unapologetically singular.