A close friend of the late Michael Jackson has revealed why the King of Pop wore a single white glove.
Jackson passed away in 2009 when he was 50 years old, but his legacy lives on with the music he left behind.
He wasn't referred to as the King of Pop for no reason, and his shows were said to be legendary.
Nothing was left unrehearsed, from the vocals to the dance moves, to every aspect of his attire.
Which leads to the question, why did he sport a single white glove?
According to someone who knew him, the accessory wasn’t just a stylistic choice - it was originally designed to conceal the first signs of his skin condition, vitiligo.
Vitiligo is a disorder where patches of skin lose their pigment due to a lack of melanin. It most often appears on visible areas like the face, neck, and hands, and affects around one in every hundred people.
Jackson first stepped out wearing his famous rhinestone-covered glove in 1983 during the Motown 25th anniversary special, a performance that helped cement his legend, per the Independent.
Years later, he explained the fashion choice in simple terms: “I felt that one glove was cool… wearing two gloves seemed so ordinary.”
But actress Cicely Tyson, who died in 2021, later revealed there was a deeper reason behind the look.
Tyson, celebrated for her roles in Sounder and How to Get Away With Murder, recalled in a CNN interview that she shared a fashion designer with Jackson in the 1980s.
“All of a sudden, [my designer] said to me ‘I’m doing this glove for Michael’. Well, Michael was beginning to develop the vitiligo and it started on his hand,” she said. “The glove was to camouflage it. That’s how that glove came into being.”
When asked how she knew, Tyson was direct: “I was there when he was creating it.”
Jackson himself confirmed his struggle with the condition during a landmark interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1993, after years of speculation about his changing appearance.
Oprah asked him directly: “The colour of your skin is obviously different than it was when you were younger. Is your skin lighter because you don’t like being Black?”
Jackson replied: “This is the situation, I have a skin disorder that destroys the pigmentation of the skin. It is something I cannot help, OK? But when people make up stories that I don’t want to be what I am it hurts me … It’s a problem for me that I can’t control.”
At another point in the interview, he said: “I’m a black American. I am proud to be a black American. I am proud of my race, and I am proud of who I am. I have a lot of pride and dignity of who I am.”
He explained that the condition began to noticeably affect him after the release of Thriller in 1982.
To manage the blotchy patches, Jackson admitted to using makeup, though he denied bleaching his skin.
Oprah later reflected on the interview, saying: “I think in 1993 nobody understood what it was. Nobody knew anything about vitiligo. I could see that that was one of the areas that was very sensitive to him, obviously.”