On a recent spring afternoon, Manuel Cuevas was celebrating his 91st birthday—at home, surrounded by friends and family. Just days before he was in the hospital with pulmonary issues, but now, he’s gingerly sipping tequila, eating pozole, and sharing stories from his extraordinary life.
Cuevas leads me from the front yard, where people are congregating, into his living room, and carefully sits down on a wooden chair. “By the time I was four-years-old, I had already read The Iliad,” he says matter of factly. He then gestures to a bear-skull dipped in silver, resting on an old piano. “I made that too,” he says, “and the piano is from the set of ‘Gunsmoke.’”
Cuevas, a Michoacán, Mexico native, lives with his wife, Ofelia Vasquez, in College Grove, Tennessee—a rural town some 45 minutes south of Nashville. I joke that the home he’s lived in since 1988 feels like a museum, and ask him how he’s feeling. “I sleep well, I read well, I enjoy life well,” he offers. “And, all the while, I lived in the galaxy.”
Cuevas is an eccentric man of mystery, with many talents and secrets. He is best known as a fashion designer and master-tailor responsible for creating cowboy couture suits worn by a who’s who of performers and luminaries over the last seven decades: Jimi Hendrix, Dolly Parton, John Lennon, and his dear friends Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. The list goes on and then rolls off the table.
“You definitely can add 90% more confidence to yourself walking on stage in a Manuel suit,” says Jack White. “It commands attention.” The award winning guitarist and lead singer of the White Stripes first met Cuevas when he was trying to get a suit made for the 2005 Grammys; he had just learned that he'd be sitting next to Lynn. “I figured I'd better get the best country suit money could buy at that time,” he says. (Lynn’s album, “Van Lear Rose,” which was produced by White, won Best Country Album that year.) “People like to think [how you dress] doesn't matter, especially in the rock and roll world, but it’s show business and it’s always mattered,” White says. “I think a lot of live performances have been altered by Manuel’s creations because you act and perform differently depending on how you are dressed and how folks respond to you.”
Generations of artists have relied on Cuevas’s designs to help enhance their on-stage persona, but also to embody the essence of their artistry. Cuevas helped make Elvis Presley’s iconic gold lamé suit alongside famed Hollywood tailor Nudie Cohn (whose daughter, Barbara, Cuevas later married). Once, the designer sent Johnny Cash nine black suits to wear on tour. When the musician asked why all the suits were black, Cuevas joked that “there was a special on black fabric.” At first, Cash was confused, but he soon realized that black harmonized with his authentic and somber brooding, and the intense introspection of songs like “Folsom Prison Blues.” The looks helped solidify Cash’s persona as “The Man In Black.”
“Manuel brought a rock and roll sensibility to the whole traditional cowboy industry,” says Marty Stuart. A Grammy Award-winning country and bluegrass singer-songwriter, Stuart first yearned for a rhinestone suit when he was 13-years-old getting ready to play with Lester Flatt at the Grand Ole Opry. “The costumes that were designed and crafted by Manuel and his team are unparalleled. The integrity of the work and the handwork is beyond comparison. It’s a language unto itself,” Stuart says.
To fully understand Manuel Cuevas, it is important to know more about who he was as a child growing up in Michoacán in the 1930s and 40s. When he was seven, his older brother was running a tailoring business, and grew tired of seeing Cuevas sitting idly on the floor; he figured he’d teach him to sew. When Cuevas was 8 years old, he built 25 shoeboxes and rented them to his peers. An entrepreneurial spirit was sparked, though it ran in the family. Cuevas’s father, a merchant, was illiterate, but “he could sell condoms to the Pope,” Cuevas says.
Soon after the success of his shoeboxes, the idea for his next business struck while buying popcorn at a fair. Cuevas decided to purchase popcorn machines and hired women to sell the snack around Michoacán. (I ask if this occurred when Cuevas was a teenager. “No, this is when I was an adult,” he says, smiling, “I was 11.”) “The girls were making 90% of the sales, but I sold them the butter, I sold them the corn. And they were beautiful—even people who hated popcorn would buy it.” As one of 14 children—two of which died at birth—Cuevas was extraordinarily driven; his siblings often commented that he was so smart they didn’t know what to do with him. “I wanted to be good at everything I did from an early age,” he says. “I never wanted to be half-ass at anything, and my siblings hated me for it.”
By the time Cuevas was 12, he realized he could design quality one-of-a-kind dresses for quinceaneras, proms, and weddings. “They all wanted dresses made by Manuel,” Cuevas says of the young women in his hometown. While fathers labeled him a thief because the dresses were expensive, still “they thought, ‘well I’m not going to kill the presentation of my daughter to society with a cheap dress,’” he says. They bought them anyway.
Cuevas and I are mid-conversation when John Partipilo, a photojournalist known for his work covering war and gang violence for Tennessee papers, enters the room. The two have been friends since the 90s. Another friend, Tomás, a retired restaurateur renting a room from Cuevas, announces that the cake is ready.
“The world is full of life,” Cuevas says as we make our way to the door. Outside musicians are strumming guitars and neighbors and family are singing karaoke. Everyone is delighted that Cuevas is out of the hospital, and Vasquez gives a speech thanking everyone for coming, and sharing her gratitude that Cuevas is able to celebrate.
The next morning, Cuevas woke up around 8 a.m. He combs back his white hair like he did the day before and dresses in a sharp gray suit, white shirt, and his signature handkerchief tied around his neck. “Let’s go eat breakfast at La Fogata,” he says. The designer frequents the restaurant in the outskirts of Nashville, which was opened by Mexican immigrants to make the food they missed from home. Someone notices Cuevas—which happens often when he goes out—and says hello, noting his local legend status. “So you think I’m a legend?” he says. “Sweet serendipity.”
When the food comes out—warm tortillas, pico de gallo, and carne a la plancha—we start talking about modern country music. “Artists don’t make money like they used to,” he says, a full fork in hand. “Authentic Mexican food is like authentic country music, it’s hard to come by these days.”
The conversation continues back at Cuevas’s house. In 1950, Cuevas moved to Baja California, and in 1952 he settled in Los Angeles. He immediately started working with Sy Devore, the tailor famous for outfitting Hollywood’s Rat Pack. But Cuevas soon became tired of making “boring suits and tuxedos.” His career and life changed when he attended the Rose Parade in Pasadena, where he saw costumes created by rodeo tailor Nathan Turk, known for his work making cowboy costumes for the Maddox Brothers, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Ernest Tubb. Cuevas couldn’t find work with Turk, but got a job working for Nudie Cohn, renowned for his iconic “Nudie Suits”—cowboy couture costumes shimmering with rhinestones, bright colors, and bold embroidery. Cuevas soon became Cohn’s lead tailor and infused his designs with symbols and motifs from the American West, Native American traditions, and his own Mexican roots, creating iconic outfits for musician Gram Parsons and one of the most significant American songwriters of the 20th century, Hank Williams.
“You’re going to see the legacy of Manuel Cuevas in Nashville probably forever,” says Sam Williams, the grandson of Hank Williams and a country music singer who debuted at the Grand Ole Opry in 2019. “There’s a historical sense [to] wearing Manuel’s pieces,” he says, “a sense of the past and honoring it.” Cuevas designed clothes for generations of the Williams family, including Hank Williams Jr., Sam’s father. “When I think of Hank Williams style,” Sam says, “it’s double-breasted suits, not a lot of flashy stuff; Hank’s silhouette comes to mind. He was very thin and very masculine.”
Cuevas recognized that while cowboy suits for musicians needed to be meticulously tailored, they also had to be ostentatious yet elegant. His vibrant, distinctive designs helped redefine the image of masculinity in country music. “When the entertainer comes on stage decked out in rhinestones, glistening and glittering, it’s total plumage—a bigger than life moment,” Stuart says.
19-year-old Mexican-American artist Ivan Cornejo, who wore one of Cuevas’s designs earlier this year, agrees. “[Manuel] told me, ‘This outfit won't be cheap, but you will be the only one wearing this suit.’ And that's how I felt—unique in my style.”
In 1975, Cuevas opened his own boutique on Lankershim Blvd. in Los Angeles, and brought in clients Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt. He quickly became the favored tailor for emerging artists like Stuart and Dwight Yoakam, helping them create distinct on-stage personas. “He could see beyond what you were, and see who you really were,” Stuart tells me.
During this time, Cuevas collaborated with famed costume designer Edith Head—winner of eight Academy Awards for Best Costume Design— and contributed to over 90 films and 13 TV shows. Now-iconic pieces fashioned by Cuevas include the jeans James Dean wore in Giant and the mask for the Lone Ranger, played by Clayton Moore. “When I was six or seven years old, I would walk three or four miles [from Antenquique to Tuxpan] to see an episode of ‘The Lone Ranger’ at the theater,” Cuevas says.
In 1988, Cuevas moved to Tennessee. His designs have since been featured in exhibits in the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Frist Art Museum. He has garnered lifetime achievement awards from both Nashville and Los Angeles, and in 2018, Cuevas was honored as an National Endowment of the Arts National Heritage Fellow.
From his sitting room, Cuevas glances up the staircase to the guest bedrooms where he says Waylon Jennings and Bob Dylan have slept. Sitting with him, I feel as though I’m with the president of an unnamed country— a country of cowboys, country music, good times, stars and endless stories. Engaging Cuevas in a conversation is what I would imagine it was like to speak to Ernest Hemmingway or the 18th-Century Mexican explorer Captain Juan Bautista de Anza. He’s both brash and lovable, sweet and salty. Cuevas has seen so much and knows so much about the archetypal ways of the world that he jumps from tidbit to tidbit, blending stories as a sort of magic realist.
Cuevas once wrote a memoir about his life, but he burned it because it wasn’t what he envisioned. He is about to start writing draft number two. He holds a doctorate in psychology and has taken an innumerable number of classes and workshops on a range of topics. And not only has Cuevas created art from textiles, he made most of the wooden furniture in his home, too—from bed frames to chairs and tables. Bull horns from “Bonanza” hang on the mantle. “I did that show for 14 years,” he says laughing. “So when those guys got fired, I got all this crap.” He likes to joke about all that he’s experienced. “I’m on my fifth wife,” he says. “Wasted time is never really wasted time.”
Cuevas never tires, even at 91, but he’s getting quieter, so I excuse myself and walk outside. A man who introduces himself as Dr. Tomás pulls me aside and asks if I want to hear a classic Manuel story. “Of course,” I say.
Years ago, Manuel Cuevas was traveling and waiting for a connecting flight in an airport. “He used to sew a red cross on his sleeve,” Tomás says. A man tugged on Cuevas's shirt and asked, “Excuse me, sir, are you a man of the cloth?” Cuevas looked up from his magazine and said, “You better fuckin’ believe it.”