Tony Alamo: the cult leader behind music’s most famous jacket

Far Out Magazine, UK/April 18, 2025

By Will Howard

If you think it’s a modern phenomenon that you can’t have unabashedly good things, think again. It’s quite simply the access we have to information these days that makes milkshake duck-ing so much more prevalent than before. The further back through history you look, the more disturbing stuff you find about seemingly innocuous good things; case in point, the Tony Alamo jacket.

For decades, these denim jackets were the ultimate in taste, going so far into the realm of bad that they did a full circle and became effortlessly chic. For a period of time, you couldn’t swing a cat in Hollywood without hitting someone who’d had a custom-made denim jacket from Tony Alamo of Nashville.

One that featured intricate bejewelling and, most eye-catching of all, spectacular airbrushed paintings on the back. In their heyday, everyone from Mr T and Dolly Parton to Mike Tyson and Brooke Shields wore one. Michael Jackson himself had a leather jacket custom-made for him that he wore on the cover of his 1987 album Bad.

Even today, celebrities like A$AP Rocky, Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj have been pictured wearing Alamos. There is something fairly undeniable about them. No one can argue with a denim jacket at the best of times. Moreover, to don one that sparkles like a disco ball with a massive picture of the New York skyline on the back is an act of ostentatiousness that, if pulled off well, can give someone a particularly timeless air of gritty vivaciousness.

However, one wonders whether each of them copped their jackets after hearing about the history of Tony Alamo and just how those jackets were made. One wonders if they did know about it, would they be showing them off with as much pride? The truth is that Tony Alamo’s story reflects all the worst aspects of the fashion industry and combines them with truly disturbing cultish behaviour and horrifying abuses of children.

What is the story of the Tony Alamo Jacket?

The first thing you might think of when you see an Alamo jacket is, “How are these made?!” It’s a valid question, as a lot of hard work did go into creating them, and pretty much all of them were hand-made. Precisely none of them were made by Tony Alamo who ran the company, though. So, who was behind the hard work? Child labour, of course, and on an industrial scale.

Alamo, along with wife Susan, had founded a church called the Alamo Christian Foundation in 1969. Right off the bat, the church fielded controversy for the cult-like tactics it employed. From the “outreach” work that saw them take in the unhoused and poor off the streets to the extortionate amounts of money they would demand from their parishioners.

Pretty soon after the church’s formation, it was demanding a percentage cut of all the businesses that its members were running and, eventually, a hand in running those companies individually. Soon, the church had established itself as a power-hungry black hole, working like an outright cult, with a living space for members of its California base and new churches opening up all over the country.

When the feds started sniffing around their Los Angeles basecamp, Alamo and their followers upped sticks to rural Arkansas, where the members were even more isolated from the world than before. This, combined with a recruitment drive focussing on young mothers and constant encouragement to couples in the cult to procreate, gave the Alamo Christian Foundation a string of very young people to provide for. Except that Alamo saw them as the workforce.

After all, the clothes that the company were producing for Alamo’s celebrity contacts back in California had to come from somewhere. By the mid-1980s, those clothes, the jackets included, were being made in a town-sized industrial space where workers undertook punishing 20-hour days, found food by scavenging from the dumpsters and could only flush their lavatories a set number of times a day to keep water bills down. The vast majority of this ‘workforce’ was children.

To be clear, Alamo was under intense scrutiny from the authorities over this. However, being a career criminal and having had his first stints in prison before he was 21, he knew exactly how to evade the law until, typically, the IRS got him on tax evasion in 1994. A large number of his assets were seized, including their entire supply of jackets, which continue to be traded today on a thriving resale market.

Upon his release four years later, Alamo continued his “work” in his ministries, albeit at a much-reduced size. He was finally caught in a way that could stick in 2009 for trafficking minors as young as nine across state lines for sex. He died in a federal prison in 2017 at the age of 82, but his life’s work is still hailed as the height of 1980s fashion to this day.

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