Michael Jackson’s face and fashion were as captivating as his music

The public may never know what Michael Jackson wore at his funeral, how he was dressed in the closed, rose-covered golden casket in which he was memorialized and buried Tuesday.

Was the King of Pop wearing a leather motorcycle jacket? A bespoke suit and skinny necktie? One of his sparkling military-style jackets? Black loafers and white socks? A single sequined glove?

We may never know. But we do know that in life, he was a force of nature whose style, sense of fashion and visual transformation were as captivating as his singing and dancing.

During Jackson’s decades in show business, he set fashion trends with a number of signature accessories: aviator sunglasses, black fedoras, dark loafers with white socks, that famous glove. His wardrobe was influenced by and reflected a fascination with fantasy, sci-fi, cinema, theater, cartoons, royalty and the military.

He revealed something of himself, the yin and the yang of sequins and buckles, leather and gauze, high-water tuxedo pants and white V-neck undershirts. He combined the tough with the delicate, hard with soft, macho with feminine, extravagant with ordinary. In the process, he reflected every social class and none, every ethnicity and none, both genders and neither.

When Jackson performed at the Motown 25 anniversary special in 1983 and set the world abuzz with the moonwalk - a dance move actually done as far back as the 1950s - he complemented his sequined white glove with a sparkling black jacket that his sister Latoya later said was actually a gift from her to their mother. A week ago, one celebrity news magazine included a pictorial on several articles of clothing that Jackson had recently worn that were adapted from womenswear runway looks by designers such as Balmain.

If Jackson’s fashion choices began to blur gender lines in recent years, his face became a study in androgyny. It morphed dramatically over the last 30 years with an estimated 50-plus cosmetic procedures on nose, eyes, cheeks, lips, chin.

As hair trends changed over the decades, Jackson went from afro to Jheri curl to perms. Few knew that he wore wigs in recent years due to hair loss and a large mass of scar tissue on his scalp that resulted from his hair catching fire during taping of a Pepsi commercial in 1984. The rate at which Jackson’s hair got straighter over the years was eclipsed only by the speed at which his skin got lighter. He claimed vitiligo, but others pointed to skin-bleaching creams he used for many years.

Glancing at a head shot of a pale, heavily made-up Jackson at the age of 50, it wasn’t clear whether he was male or female, black or white. Perhaps no one in the history of celebrity had engineered a more total visual transformation, one that became more jarring and tragic as time went on. By the sad end, he had achieved a look that no one could quite understand.

Part of the explanation lies in Jackson’s own insecurities and self-hatred, in the pressure on people of color to conform to a European standard of beauty and especially on darker-skinned celebrities to become more widely accepted. Part of the explanation lies, too, in Western cultures’ obsession with the myth of eternal youth. Celebrities are under greater pressure than the rest of us to look immortally young, and their efforts fuel the multibillion-dollar industries of physical augmentation and anti-aging skincare.

In the final analysis, Jackson’s face and fashion reflected a failure to achieve his goal of transcending the limits of gender, race, age and time. He crafted an image that was, in many ways, as universal as his music. But ultimately, the face that he left this world with was not one that even he appeared to love.

Though in many ways larger than life, Michael Jackson was just another human being with his share of weaknesses, frailties and limitations. The difference is that his were exposed on a global stage. With that in mind, one can only hope that his contributions to music, the arts, charities, and humanitarian efforts will be remembered long after what he looked like is forgotten.