GRAMMY Week 2020 kicked off with a stylish bang on Monday, Jan. 20 at the GRAMMY Museum's grand opening event for their new Amy Winehouse exhibit, "Beyond Black — The Style of Amy Winehouse." The exhibit pays tribute to the six-time GRAMMY Award-winning artist, whose iconic style is still defining fashion today. The free public event, hosted by music journalist Eve Barlow, was fully booked, and the line of supporters began accumulating more than an hour early. 

Longtime roommate and close friend of Amy Winehouse, Catriona Gourlay, and Winehouse’s stylist, Naomi Parry, spoke with the Recording Academy before the event about their favorite dresses at the exhibit, how they came to know Winehouse, and the items on display that trigger the most personal memories. 

"Amy and I met at a bar because my friend fancied her friend. We bonded over how we both backcombed our hair," Parry recalled with a smile. It wasn’t until later though, that she came on board as Winehouse's stylist. "Amy already had the sort of rockabilly style. It started before she and I were working together." Though hesitant to take any credit, Gourlay, who met Amy through a mutual school friend, was in fact responsible for the rockabilly component of Winehouse's wardrobe. 

"It was actually because of this vintage shop called Rocket in Camden that Catriona used to work at," Parry explains. "All the girls in there had the curls, tattoos, piercings, and little dresses. Amy was quite heavily influenced by them." Parry went on to describe how, when she came on board, she took it upon herself to modernize Winehouse's style without sacrificing anything the singer particularly identified with. Parry was responsible for introducing Winehouse to different brands and labels because she felt that that's what worked best with her music. "I wanted to make it a little more fashion. I didn't want her to be pigeon-holed in that rockabilly look."

Amy Winehouse's stylist Naomi Parry, Winehouse's close friend Catriona Gourlay and music journalist Eve Barlow participate in a panel discussion
Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

One dress that stuck out in both Gourlay's and Parry's minds as synonymous with Winehouse arriving at her true style is The Yellow Preen dress, which she wore at the 2007 Brit awards, and was paired with the red, heart-shaped bag that is also on display.

When asked which pieces in the exhibit trigger a particular memory, Gourlay responded first. "We've got some of her Laura Mercier chocolate body cream and her Givenchy Hot Couture perfume, and the combination of things really hits us still. It’s that thing you can't have anymore. Smelling somebody again."

For Parry, the memory-triggering item is one not yet on display. "There is a dress which will arrive at the exhibit next week, the first one I did the print design for. It’s a dress that’s got two flamingos on it that are in sort of a heart shape." Parry explains how this design came to be while sitting in Winehouse's living room with her sketchbook. Deciding the heart shape may be a bit cheesy, she experimented with other flamingo ideas as Amy sat on the sofa opposite. "I'd [drawn] one of them with its head in the water. I was about to leave and she came over to see what I’d been doing. She was taken aback  "It's got its head in the water — it looks like a brain!'" So, she changed it back to the heart-shaped flamingos. 

Shoes and handbags worn by Amy Winehouse
Photo by Amanda Edwards/Getty Images

And it came as no surprise that Winehouse favored the heart-shaped flamingo design, given that the pages of lyrics and notes on display along the exhibition walls were decorated with heart doodles and illustrations of Winehouse's tattoo art. Winehouse, who liked to draw and write by hand, inspired the GRAMMY Museum to invite artists to give event-goers their own Winehouse doodle souvenirs to take home. Throughout the evening, a line wrapped the second-floor exhibits where guests were having caricature portraits done of themselves with Amy Winehouse.

During the pre-event panel, Parry and Gourlay shared additional stories and memories related to Winehouse’s fashion choices. "She was keen to support emerging young designers," Naomi recalls, noting that this often presented a problem on the red carpet. "I would recite the designers' names with her over and over before her events," Parry explained, but Winehouse would draw a blank when she was on the red carpet. "One poor designer…Tina Kalivas, was introduced as 'Tina the Cleaner,'" Parry shared with a laugh. 

Winehouse, who passed away in 2011 at age 27, had only released two albums during her short life. However, rather than dwelling on the darkness surrounding her passing as many Winehouse tributes have in the past, this exhibit celebrates Winehouse's colorful and unique style as well as her groundbreaking impact on both music and fashion history.

"It wasn’t about how expensive something was, and she didn't mind wearing the same dress two, three, four times." Gourlay said. "It was about what she liked."

"Beyond Black — The Style of Amy Winehouse." opens to the public on Jan. 17 and will run through April 13, 2020. For more information, visit the GRAMMY Museum website.