AMAZING GRACE

Grace Jones is an intersectional iconoclast whose fluid approach to style, identity and creativity was decades ahead of its time. Transcending national, sexual and racial stereotypes, she has cross-fertilised music, fashion, cinema and her own life into one ceaseless performance. Both quintessentially eighties and timelessly prescient, she often improved on originals and smuggled the vanguard into the mainstream.

Born in British Jamaica in either 1948 or 1952 (depending on whom you believe), Grace was the third child of Marjorie and Robert W. Jones, a local politician and clergyman. When her parents moved to the American east coast for Robert’s work, the children were left with Marjorie’s mother and her younger new husband, Peart (nicknamed ‘Mas P’), an abusive disciplinarian whom Grace “absolutely hated”. At the age of 13, Grace moved with her siblings to the New York district of Syracuse. Teenage Grace rebelled