‘People should wear what they feel like, and it has nothing to do with age,’ says Barbra Streisand

She flirted with Marlon Brando and even with then-Prince Charles. She has been romantically linked to a succession of Hollywood heartthrobs — think Warren Beatty and Ryan O’Neal.

But there are no sensual bedroom scenes in “My Name Is Barbra,” Barbra Streisand’s exhaustively detailed autobiography. Instead, the multi-hyphenate star — singer, actress, producer, director, philanthropist — devotes attention to her wardrobe, which she documents, page after page, down to every sparkly sequin.

Growing up, this self-proclaimed “skinny” from Brooklyn, New York, treasured her burgundy sweater with wooden buttons that “set her apart from the other kids on her first day at camp.”

Her almost fetishistic memory takes her back to her teenage years, when every dollar she earned babysitting or working as a cashier at a Chinese restaurant went toward clothes. There was, in particular, a lace skirt and a blouse printed with small pink and white checks with matching shoes — “pink pointy-toed flats that showed a bit of my toes.”

Long before the rise of celebrity stylists, Streisand, 81, learned to create her image on the premise that if she couldn’t rely on her features to project glamor and obvious sex appeal, she could rely on her mix of unusual elegance.

“I think I looked different, I dressed different,” Streisand said in an email last week, part of a rare interview, her first focused exclusively on fashion. “I never just followed the style of the day. I had other images in my head. I was inspired by period films, paintings in museums and those fabulous posters from [Alphonse] Mucha by Sarah Bernhardt that I first saw when I was a teenager.”

A “good Jewish girl” from the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, she was painfully aware of her difference. “No one would look at me and think, ‘That girl should be a movie star,'” she writes in her autobiography. “I have a small head, a crooked nose, my mouth is too big and my eyes are too small. Did I even think I was sexy? No.”

But instead of hiding this difference, she made the most of it, constantly downplaying her sexuality. In her early days, she performed in sailor-style shirts, quaint Victorian outfits straight from the thrift store, and a masculine-feminine mix of masculine tweeds and feminine blouses with bows.

For her 1960 debut at Bon Soir, a piano bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, she wore what she described in the interview as “a turn-of-the-century, high-necked, long-sleeved Persian waistcoat, embroidered with silver thread, over a simple black dress”.

On the second night, she took the stage wearing a Victorian coat that she trimmed with pink satin ribbon to match 1920s pink satin shoes that, as she now recalls, “cost only $3 [menos de R$ 15 no câmbio atual] at the second-hand store.”

The point was, she said, “I didn’t identify with the conventional type of dress that most nightclub singers wore. Instead, I took a masculine fabric — a black and white herringbone tweed — and designed a vest , which I wore with a white chiffon blouse and a matching tweed skirt, long to the floor with a slit up the side, and lined in red. I’ve been wearing a version of this suit ever since.”

Streisand’s striking originality impressed Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. “She saw something in me when other people were making jokes,” Streisand writes in her autobiography. “She talked about me as a fashion icon, long before I imagined she would one day be on the best-dressed list.” She made the list twice.

She did her best to live up to that image, sitting front row at Chanel wearing a leopard coat and matching hat, and taking the stage in her signature Empire-style gowns.

“I’ve always loved this style, with the high waist and the fabric falling to the floor,” she said last week. “It suited my body and gave me room to breathe when I sang.”

As his fame grew, so did his refinement, along with a confidence matched only by his audacity. An admitted perfectionist, she rummaged through her own closet for many of her film roles, including “Our Love of Yesterday” and “The Prince of Tides.”

She dared to design her own custom models for Bill Blass, Arnold Scaasi and other renowned designers. For her 1998 wedding to actor James Brolin (yes, they’re still together), she asked her friend Donna Karan to dress her in an Empire-style gown, although Karan convinced her to wear a lace tulle confection that draped accumulated at his feet.

Authoritarian? Thorough? Streisand has heard it all. “Okay, maybe I was a little controlling,” he writes in the autobiography.

She was a relentless perfectionist, but there were failures — especially an infamous wardrobe malfunction. To her horror, Scaasi’s glittery trouser ensemble that she wore to accept her first Oscar in 1969 proved transparent under the stage lights.

And she withstood some criticism. When she appeared at President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ball wearing a pinstripe suit, a vest that showed off her bust, and a long skirt with a seductive slit down the side, a writer criticized in The New York Times that her ensemble sent a ” disturbing signal” and a “mixed and coquettish message”.

Streisand is still upset. “I thought the writer was reading too much into that costume, and it said more about her than it did about me,” she said in an email. “As I wrote in my book, ‘Why can’t women be successful and attractive, strong and sensitive, intelligent and sensual?’.”

And dress according to your age? This concept escapes her. “People should express themselves and wear what they feel like on any given day,” she said. “And it has nothing to do with age.”

In the interview, Streisand recalled that a few years ago she had suggested posing for the cover of W magazine wearing just a white shirt “and no pants.” “Just legs,” she said.

Early in her career, she had resisted such overt expressions of her sensuality. “I was afraid of being seen that way back then,” she said. “Now I’m too old to care.”

But it’s never too late to give up on fashion or, in this case, stop accumulating treasures. Streisand owns movie costumes, a Fortuny dress, vintage clothes and antique dolls.

“Some of these dolls are 100 years old,” she said. “Every now and then, they need a new pair of shoes, don’t they?” She keeps many of these artifacts in an underground space on her property in Malibu.

They play their part in a narrative that has taken her far from home. The stranger from Brooklyn who refused to get rid of the bump on her nose has turned into a swan. How should be.

“We all grew up with fairy tales,” Streisand writes. “Who doesn’t love a Cinderella story?”