On the night of March 28, 1957, about 12,000 people packed the International Amphitheatre in Chicago. When Elvis Presley walked out, he was shining from his neck to his toes.
He had on a gold jacket and gold pants, with gold shoes, a gold tie and a gold belt. Under the stage lights, he looked like a trophy that had learned to dance.
The whole outfit was the brainchild of Colonel Tom Parker, the former carnival promoter who managed Elvis and loved a good gimmick. Elvis was 22 and had a Hollywood movie deal, so the Colonel wanted an outfit nobody could miss. One account says Parker told the tailor he wanted something “out-of-this-world spectacular.”
The tailor was Nudie Cohn. He’d been born in Kyiv, in what’s now Ukraine, and was sent to America as a boy to escape attacks on Jewish families. By the 1950s, his shop, Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors, was dressing country singers and cowboy movie stars in rhinestones.
The bill for the suit came to $2,500.
That was real money in 1957, when the cheapest new Chevrolet cost $1,885. So Elvis was wearing more than the price of a new car.
The Colonel’s publicity team made it sound even bigger, calling it “the famous $10,000 gold lamé suit.” Nudie later joked that $9,500 of that was pure profit.
Elvis didn’t like it.
Lamé is cloth woven with thin metallic threads, and it’s stiff and hot to wear. The pants creased in ways he thought looked bad. And when he dropped to his knees during “Hound Dog,” gold flecks reportedly came off on the stage. Biographer Peter Guralnick wrote that Elvis felt embarrassed by how clownish it was.
He wore the full suit on stage just three times, in Chicago, St. Louis and Toronto, all within a week. After that, he swapped the gold pants for black ones and kept the jacket.
That’s the version he wore in Hawaii on November 10, 1957, when he played Honolulu Stadium. Rare footage from that night made it into director Baz Luhrmann’s new concert film, which the trailer gives a taste of.
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert | Official Main Trailer
Then the Army called, and while Elvis served, the Colonel kept the suit in storage.
But Parker still had plans for it. In November 1959, RCA put out a record called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. The cover showed Elvis in that gold suit over and over, with 16 full and partial images of him shining.
Elvis pulled the jacket out one more time. On March 25, 1961, he played a benefit in Honolulu to help build the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, and a local paper said he “was wearing his famous gold jacket with the silvery glints like sequins.” After that night, it never came out in public again.
Seven years later, designer Bill Belew was planning outfits for Elvis’s big 1968 TV special. He suggested bringing back the gold suit, and Elvis turned him down flat.
“Billy, I have to be honest with you,” he said. “I always hated that suit, and I won’t wear it.”
The suit stuck around anyway. In 1987, Elvis Presley Enterprises bought the Colonel’s collection, and it went on display in Memphis. Graceland’s archivists still take the jacket out now and then, like in this short clip.