From the beginning of her career, Annie Lennox understood that image could be a weapon, a language as sharp and deliberate as any lyric. Long before gender fluidity entered mainstream culture, she challenged the visual codes of femininity and masculinity with an ease that felt radical yet instinctive. Her androgyny was a form of authorship, a way of shaping desire, power, and identity through appearance. Over four decades, Lennox turned fashion into a cinematic vocabulary, setting the foundations for the contemporary dialogue around gender and self-styling. Revisiting her visual journey today reveals not only an artist of extraordinary range, but a visionary who helped expand the grammar of pop iconography itself.
She first entered public consciousness as a founding member of the short-lived new wave project The Tourists in the late ’70s, releasing three albums before disbanding. Their music, with Lennox and guitarist Peet Coombes sharing vocal duties, was band-oriented and pop-leaning, lighter than post-punk Britain’s expectations, but in retrospect, critics recognise it as pure pop-rock in the vein of Blondie’s Parallel Lines.
It was as one half of the synth-based duo Eurythmics (with ex-Tourist and ex-boyfriend Dave Stewart) that Lennox achieved international success. Their debut album In the Garden went largely unnoticed, but the 1983 video for “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”, with surreal imagery, Lennox’s orange cropped hair, a man’s suit, a boardroom, and a wandering cow, catapulted her into global visibility. Grace Jones had already toyed with androgyny, but Lennox’s gender-bending struck mainstream sensibilities overnight; the BBC declared the video “broke the mould for female pop stars.” “Sweet Dreams” won Best New Artist at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards, and by year’s end, Eurythmics had released their follow-up LP.
Sweet Dreams marked a sharp departure from the Tourists’ pop, while Touch cemented it, selling even better. From then on, Lennox experimented with her looks in every Eurythmics image, sometimes adopting multiple personas in one video, a custom that would endure throughout her solo career. Each persona dramatised her poignant, mysterious, and occasionally outlandish music.
TOURISTS DEFACED BRIDE
The Tourists was largely a DIY project. Lennox met writers and musicians Peet Coombes and Dave Stewart through mutual friends; she and Stewart also became romantically involved. Coombes, who passed away in 1997, was a prolific musical talent living in a London basement squat with his family.
The band first recorded as The Catch in 1977 with an unsuccessful single, then rebranded as The Tourists. Their debut self-titled album appeared in 1979, followed by Reality Effect, for which this photograph was taken. According to Lennox in her book Retrospective, photographer Gered Mankowitz staged a seamless white dining room for the album cover, dressed the band in white, and handed them bottles of coloured paint to pour gradually. A tipsy Peet squeezed blue paint across the set, creating the final image, while Lennox, in a white wedding dress with white flowers, was captured covered in paint, reminiscent of a Dutch floral still life. Even here, Lennox gravitates toward symbolic disruption: purity defaced, roles scrambled, expectation subverted.
BLACK LEATHER
The Lennox–Stewart partnership outlasted The Tourists, giving birth to Eurythmics. Their name, defined by Merriam-Webster as “the art of harmonious bodily movement… in response to improvised music,” reflected their inventive approach. Around this time, Annie dyed her hair orange and cut it shorter.
Their debut album, recorded in Germany with producer Conny Plank, was deemed too experimental by RCA. But the sophomore effort, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), introduced a look as instantly recognisable as the title song’s drumbeat. Jean Paul Gaultier’s SS13 show even referenced her suit and spiky reddish hair. Lennox incorporated theatrical elements into her album artwork, black velvet masks and later black leather, visually aligning with the harder-edged sound. Here, Lennox helped define a new iconography of androgynous power: angular tailoring, graphic minimalism, and coded eroticism that would later echo across designers from Gaultier to Helmut Lang.
MS VIRGINALLY ANGELIC
The following years brought commercially successful albums, moving from synth-based to rock-influenced production, with guests including Elvis Costello, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder, whose harmonica solo appears in “There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)” from Be Yourself Tonight (1985). The video recalls late Fellini or Derek Jarman Rococo fantasies, with Lennox appearing as an angel with unusually long hair (also worn during her debut film role in Revolution, starring Al Pacino), accompanied by cherub-like performers. By adopting hyper-feminine fantasy, she exposes its artificiality, showing how femininity can be constructed, exaggerated, and ultimately reclaimed as an aesthetic tool rather than a social expectation.
WOMAN DRESSED AS MAN DRESSED AS WOMAN
Savage, recorded in Normandy and mixed in Paris, marked a return to darker, experimental tones. Almost three decades before Beyoncé, Lennox and Stewart released a visual album accompanying the record, with each song receiving a video. In “Beethoven (I Love to Listen to),” Annie plays a neurotic housewife transforming into a glam vamp, her androgynous features concealed beneath a blond wig and heavy makeup, a sophisticated take on the Madonna-whore complex. This era crystallises Lennox’s mastery of persona: doubling, masking, and inversion become strategies to reveal how gender is staged, performed, and endlessly mutable.
THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL
The ’90s brought Eurythmics’ hiatus. Lennox stepped back from the spotlight, balancing family life with work. Her early solo career, starting with Diva, revealed a playful, Gothic-Romantic ice-queen persona. A video companion, directed by Sophie Muller, provided a reflective commentary on her career, blending wit with theatricality. While not as instantly recognisable as “Sweet Dreams,” without Diva, there would be no Florence Welch or Caroline Polachek. That same year, Lennox performed a song for the Bram Stoker’s Dracula soundtrack in full vampire makeup. Diva marks Lennox’s shift into myth-making: glamour becomes a form of introspection, and the boundary between self and character dissolves into a single, controlled visual narrative.
LIAISONS DANGEREUSES
From the videos made for Diva, apart from lead single “Why” (where Lennox undergoes another drag transformation), “Walking on Broken Glass” dramatises seduction and desire in Baroque style alongside John Malkovich and Hugh Laurie. Dressed in a red velvet period gown and turban, Lennox channels a decadent courtesan aesthetic, visually rich, melodramatic, and captivating. Her Baroque theatricality reframes pop as high visual culture, merging camp, history, and irony in a way that anticipates artists who use pastiche as critique.
WILLKOMMEN, BIENVENUE, WELCOME…
In “Little Bird,” shot late in her pregnancy with daughter Tali, Annie opted for a meta approach: impersonators of her many personas populate the video. Her ringmaster figure blends Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey’s characters from Cabaret in a playful yet reflective, self-referential performance. By letting her personas confront one another, Lennox stages identity as plural, fluid, and knowingly constructed. Tali Lennox would grow up to become a fashion model and visual artist whose paintings continue her mother’s aesthetic explorations. Annie reprised “Little Bird” at the 2012 London Olympics closing ceremony, arriving on a decaying pirate ship — a demonstration of enduring cool.
JUST FOR ONE DAY
In 1992, Annie performed at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley, honouring the late Queen vocalist. Over 7,000 attended, alongside more than twenty guest musicians, including David Bowie. Lennox, with slicked-back hair, mask-like eyeshadow, and an Antony Price silver armour-like dress paired with a vast black crinoline skirt, joined Bowie onstage for “Under Pressure.” Her fondling of Bowie at the song’s climax was spontaneous and in the heat of the moment, but who can blame her? It’s not every day you get to sing with a legend.
In the following years, Annie became deeply involved in HIV/AIDS advocacy, especially in Africa, alongside other humanitarian work.
LA CAGE AUX FOLLES
Her solo album Medusa, a covers project, followed Diva. Lead single “No More ‘I Love You’s’” earned her a Grammy, and the video, co-directed by Lennox, adhered to her established Gothic-Baroque aesthetic. She appears as a courtesan, surrounded by drag ballet dancers. Inspired by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, it is atmospheric, slightly unsettling, yet utterly captivating. Here, she fuses vulnerability with theatricality, showing how performance can reveal, rather than conceal, emotional depth.
DARK MINNIE MOUSE
Lennox also transformed Bob Marley’s “Waiting in Vain” into an electro-pop ballad. For the video and some public appearances, she wore a black minidress and mouse ears, debuting the look at the 1995 Grammys. She later explained: “Mickey Mouse is very sinister… My children love him, all children love him, but Mickey Mouse is big because of dollars… I wore the ears… to connect the Mickey Mouse crown with the fetishistic dark underworld of sex and whoredom that the Grammys represent.” This look emphasises her talent for subversion, turning a pop-cultural symbol into a darkly ironic commentary on desire, commodification, and the politics of image.
Since the 2000s, Lennox’s releases and appearances have been rare, often tied to activism. Her live performances have been stripped down to voice and piano, and her image has become more discreet. At 70, her legacy is secure: a fearless, playful, gender-bending pioneer. Designers such as Gareth Pugh cite her as a definitive “music muse,” and who could forget when she took the stage for the Vogue World finale in 2023, wearing a custom silvery, bedazzled jacket by Richard Quinn reading “God Save the World.” Lennox’s influence endures not through spectacle alone, but through artistry, intelligence, and subtle provocation, a model of cool that never shouts.
Across four decades, Annie Lennox turned appearance into articulation, a means of expressing desire, defiance, vulnerability, and power with equal precision. Her androgyny was never a gimmick nor a provocation for its own sake; it was a structural argument about how gender is composed, performed, and continually renegotiated. By moving fluidly between personas, she exposed the artifice behind every aesthetic code, turning pop performance into a site of cultural critique long before the discourse had a name.
Her influence runs deep in the theatrical identity of every artist who understands understands that self-invention is not camouflage but authorship. Lennox showed that style could be a manifesto, sharp, intelligent, and radically self-aware.
As gender play becomes central to fashion once again, her work feels not retrospective but startlingly prescient. Lennox did not simply bend norms; she rewired the visual vocabulary of modern music. In doing so, she left a blueprint for artistic freedom, one that continues to echo wherever image and identity meet.
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Written by Nacho Pajin @nachopajin