When Cher first appeared on TV—a 25-year-old sylph cracking wise in spangly couture alongside her shorter, older, mustachioed husband—millions of people watched her every week, the kind of market share that’s basically inconceivable 51 years later. “Sonny and I didn’t know what fame was until Sonny & Cher became a hit,” she says. It was a rocket ship that left her in a different stratosphere as a mononymous multi-hyphenate, an Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar winner, and a fashion icon. Today it has also made her the star of the new Ugg FEEL ____ campaign. (Quoth the brand, “Being an icon is about having the freedom and courage to explore your own journey and individuality, Cher is globally renowned for the bold and unapologetic way she lives her life, something Ugg has always related to.”) For the campaign she filmed a short video that shows her wearing Ugg boots and doing iconically Cher things around her Malibu estate: talking to her mom on the phone, watching movies in her home cinema, taking in the unobstructed sunset from an elaborate wicker throne, and consulting her cat. “I’ve spent a lifetime with people either loving me or hating me,” she says in the video. “And I mean, you want to be loved, but finally it’s like, fuck it.”
She’s not wrong about the opinions. When you have an interview scheduled with Cher, all anyone you meet in the weeks beforehand wants to talk to you about is Cher. A designer at a cocktail party confides that “like 90% of red carpets now are people just trying to do what Cher did 40 years ago.” Your Uber driver is thrilled. “Cher’s Armenian!” (So is he.) A school friend goes into rhapsodies over her performances in Moonstruck, Silkwood, and Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! A guy you play tennis with wants to talk about her influence on drag, and on *Drag Race—*specifically, he wants to know her thoughts on Cher: The Unauthorized Rusical.
Compilations of her Sonny & Cher and The Cher Show comedy riffs and you-go-girl quips boomerang around the internet, going viral every other month or so. You can recite them easily: “Can I hear a little commotion for the dress?”; “Men are not a necessity… they’re a luxury, like dessert”; “Mom, I am a rich man.” The new West Side Story comes out and guess what? Cher already did her own one-woman 12 minute version in 1978 on her Cher…Special. If it’s Halloween, forget it, you’re going to be drowning in hot girl Chers from every era: taut tawny tummies, glittery crop top and trouser sets; furry vests and bell bottoms; fishnet body stockings, sequins galore. The only real constant is the consistent, instantly recognizable attitude. The attitude is what makes an icon.
The day of the Ugg shoot, Cher’s Malibu dream house (“built for Cher by Cher,” one of her two managers says) is a sea of fire hydrant sized floral arrangements. Upstairs in her white linen and carved rosewood bedroom, Cher is loath to define her current personal style. “Oh babe, I don’t know,” she says. “I know what it’s been. I have things that I’ve had in my wardrobe for 30 years. The other night I was wearing my black bondage pants, and I’ve had those since I don't know, Granny Takes a Trip,” the 1960s London boutique beloved by rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and the Rolling Stones. “I don’t remember how long I’ve had them, that's how long I’ve had them.” Cher advises shopping your closet. “If you keep certain things, then you can bring them back, and if they’re good and they’re interesting, you can put them all together.”
She still has the fur vest she wore in the early 1960s when she and Sonny emerged on the scene with long hair, handmade bell bottoms, and “I Got You Babe.” “We had a look that people just really didn’t understand at all. We were so proud of our look and our clothes, but we couldn’t get on a lot of shows. I mean even The Beatles wore little suits,” she says. She was in her late teens when the former Cherilyn Sarkisian evolved into Cher Bono, during that brief period before her surname became an irrelevant detail. “No one was doing what we were doing. There weren’t stylists to take on people who were unknown or doing something really different.” Things are blander now, she says—aspiring stars arrive buffed to a high sheen. “They don’t even have rough edges when they start.” And then there’s the fact that at any given awards show, the chances are a few of them have been styled to look like an early version of her.
Cher has not yet heard the phrase, “it’s giving Cher,” though she appears to believe you when you say it was intended as the highest of compliments, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and all that. That she gets. Take the gown that she wore to the very first Met Gala in 1974, the sheer one dripping with sequins and feathers that’s inspired everyone from Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian to Dua Lipa and J.Lo. “I like it! I see all the young girls kind of wearing these things that I’ve worn my whole life. They think it's new, or they see a picture and they love it, so they do their own version. Or they do my version. It doesn't bother me.” Technically it’s Bob Mackie’s version. Cher met Mackie in 1967 backstage at the Carol Burnett show, and when she and Sonny had their own she hired him straightaway. Their partnership far outlasted her and Sonny’s. “Bob Mackie was so ahead of everyone, and he had the luxury of me never caring what it was,” she says. “It was never too little, it was never too much bling. I was always thrilled with everything he gave me. I don’t think I ever disliked—maybe one or two dresses, that was about it, and it was because of the color. I don’t like red and I don’t like orange.” Cher and Mackie have the same feelings about clothes, she says. “We’re both so invested in the emotional feeling of them.” He still designs her tour costumes.
Fashion wasn’t always such a boon for her career. Hers was the first female bared navel on television, and censors plagued her after she and Sonny divorced, despite her ensembles being no more revealing than they’d been while she was married. In 1989, MTV initially banned her video for “Turn Back Time” thanks to her fishnet thong bodysuit. But Cher doesn’t regret any trends. “Look,” she says. “It’s not life or death.” In the ’80s she started acting in films, usually playing characters who never depended on their clothes. “I kind of liked that. It took me such a long time to get a job, because people think the clothes might indicate that you’re not serious enough to do it. I had friends, I knew every studio head in town, but they wouldn’t give me a job.” She got the last laugh. “There was a guy, he was a critic, and every year he would write that it would be my last year. It was 10 years that he did it, and I finally said to him, ‘I will still be here when you are not.’”
You tell her how awed you are by her strength, and she asks what you mean. Well, her ability to stand up for herself on stage with Sonny Bono and in court against him when he took all of her money; to love Gregg Allman and leave him when it became clear his heroin addiction had no room for a life with a partner and children in it; to date whoever the hell she wanted; to tell a plastic surgery-obsessed media that “if I want to put tits on my back it’s nobody’s business but my own.” Did she ever wish she had done something else, gone some other route? “I always knew that there was nothing else for me to be but an entertainer,” Cher says. She doesn’t think she’s been particularly strong, not unusually so. “I saw too many women of my mother’s generation put up with shit that I wasn't going to,” she says. “And I love men, they’re fabulous. But I didn’t want any of them telling me what to do. I had that with Sonny. He was Italian and he felt it was the man's place to tell the woman what to do. When I left him I was thinking, you know what, that's never gonna happen again, because I’m too old for that shit.” She wasn’t that old. She was 27. “That was a lot older then.”
Still, it’s one thing to talk about something and another to do it. She’s done it and she keeps doing it: taking on Twitter trolls and politicians with ease, it seems, along with side projects like rescuing and rehoming an abused elephant in Islamabad, and founding a pandemic resource and response initiative called CherCares to get people vaccinated. “I haven’t always been strong,” she says. “The balance between strength and frailty has to mix back and forth. When the chips are down, I’m strong, I’m tough, I’m not not nice, but I can withstand a lot. But I also am very very fragile. So, you know. Figure that out.” She already has.
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