Mick Jagger wore this jacket for the historic Rolling Stones headline performance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage, Sunday, 30 June at 9.30pm in front of an audience of 135,000 people.
Arriving on stage to the soundtrack of tribal drum beats he opened the set wearing L’Wren Scott’s oak leaf jacket to ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ followed by ‘It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It)’. The opening outfit is hugely important and Scott designed this jacket with its shimmering texture for maximum impact, worn with a black silk shirt and skinny jeans. Jagger cast it off at the beginning of the third song ‘Paint It, Black’ whilst thanking organizer Michael Eavis (tongue in cheek) for ‘After all these years they finally got round to inviting us’. Michael Eavis had been trying to secure the group to perform there for many years. In an interview the day before the show Jagger spoke of the eagerly anticipated Rolling Stones Glastonbury performance, 'I look upon it as a culmination of our British heritage really,' he said. 'It had to be done and it's going to be done, and we'll see what happens, you know' (Interview with the Guardian, 29 June 2013).
L’Wren Scott designed his stage clothes for the Stones ‘50 & Counting'. The clothes were a collaboration between the pair, to ensure sartorial satisfaction was guaranteed. The clothes needed to be eye catching, colourful (to be seen clearly on stage) but to also be comfortable, especially as Jagger’s performances are so famously athletic. In an interview in 2012 (WWD, November 2012) he declared, ‘Men aren’t interested in clothes that look amazing but are fantastically uncomfortable to wear. We’re not into pain. We’re into comfort’. Scott agreed, ‘At the end of the day (the performer) has to feel good (in his clothes). It’s not you or I dancing and prancing out there’. As a performance usually lasts at least two hours she ensured that the clothes were not only beautiful, but not too restrictive, hot or scratchy, the jackets made with extra seaming at underarms and across the back for more strength, all cleverly concealed by the finest glossy silk linings on which she insisted for all her designs. ‘Architecture’s a big part of our design – how to make heavily constructed things that are comfortable’.
For Glastonbury Jagger requested something with a very British vibe. He recalled, 'We started to think about the Glastonbury show and I said to her that I wanted something very English — an oak leaf. That’s where we started from in the Glastonbury show, nobody [in the audience] realized they were really oak leaves [on the jacket] — but I did… it’s important. Most people just think it’s a bright green jacket, but if you look you can see. Glastonbury is an essentially English event’.
Scott explained that she had originally suggested to do something around a leaf motif for Glastonbury. 'So I did some tests of embroidery of leaves and I showed Mick a drawing with an embroidery swatch attached. He loved the leaf idea, and I said it’s kind of like a “glamouflage.”’
'We were joking about the glamouflage at Glastonbury, and he said ‘Well I want it to be an oak leaf. So, if you look at it closely you see the oak leaves — it’s quite cool. It just felt very right for Glasto, to open the show with a very outdoorsy feel — and the crowd was incredible.'