From Caftan King to Peacock Pasha: Demis Roussos and Orientalist decadence in men’s fashion and European popular culture, 1968–80

Abstract

The Greek-Egyptian singer Artemios Ventouris (Demis) Roussos (1946–2015) was a global superstar in the 1970s, selling more than 60 million albums. Roussos’s success was built on his hard work, talent and ability to craft a sensual, comforting, caftan-clad performance persona that tapped into the 1970s zeitgeist. Scholarship to date has considered the decadence of Orientalism and caftans in fashion, including their importance in the so-called ‘Peacock Revolution’ of menswear. It has also considered how Roussos used a nostalgia linked to warm, sunny package holidays – a new European phenomenon in the 1970s – within his songs to great commercial success. Less attention, however, has been paid to how Roussos used the materialism and Orientalist symbolism of his luxurious caftans with his voice, hirsuteness and embonpoint to create the seductive, sensual atmosphere that was central to his fame and offered his fans an alternative to dominant images of 1970s male rock stars. This article also examines how wearing caftans allowed Roussos to create his ‘pasha’ persona, a hypermasculine figure associated with decadent Orientalist stereotypes of the harems and palaces of the mythical East. Roussos’s ‘pasha’ image extended beyond the stage and his gargantuan appetites for food and the trappings of luxury were also central to recreating the atmosphere of decadence he remembered from his Egyptian childhood. This article thus traces how, as Roussos’s fame and girth expanded, he made caftans his trademark, blending an Orientalist, libertine style of living and dress that seduced his fans and expressed the era’s, and his own, desires for excesses that transgressed bourgeois notions of restrained, good taste.