Even the Rolling Stones' career began with a small mistake.

You can see it in a picture from the spring of 1963, which captures the moment before the first British tour.

Five young men in houndstooth jackets, ties and almost identical black trousers pose for the photographer Philip Townsend.

The guys look identical, even the hairstyles only differ in nuances.

Brave British.

That could be the Beatles too.

And then that moment is already history.

Manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who had a similar style strategy for the young band as for the mushrooms managed by Brian Epstein - all in suits - quickly realized that the idea was of little use to his protégés.

Uniformity helped the Beatles, individuality shaped the Stones.

“A break with form”, is how designer Tommy Hilfiger calls this daring step in the recently published book “Unzipped”.

Little has changed in that respect to this day.

The Rolling Stones are five men in the longest-running rock band in the world, five personal preferences - and five differentiated style models.

Mick Jagger

Hardly any living musician has absorbed, shaped and helped shape the world of fashion as much as frontman Mick Jagger. In the 1960s he was part of Swinging London like ruffled shirts and velvet coats. "By mixing camp and audacity, Jagger's aesthetic was as powerful as it was feminine," said the BBC about the singer's sixties glamor. He wore open jackets and military coats, pursed his lips and circled his hips. Elvis Presley unbuttoned his shirt a little ten years earlier, Mick Jagger tore it off completely.

Jagger was Soho's dandy, Carnaby Street his fashionable home.

What he wore became a hit in the boutiques.

He did not shy away from wearing jewelry, donning circus costumes, and shocked society with a touch of bisexuality - even if his well-documented stories of women never left any doubts about his preferences.

In the seventies, the dandy developed into a bohemian.

Glamorous looks, tight collars, silver-colored adhesive strips on the pants.

In 2007 Jagger wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in the face of such outfits: "Let's put it as it is: They may even be embarrassing."

Mick Jagger often worked closely with the most important designers of his time.

He took over the rhinestone-adorned one-pieces from Ossie Clark, as "Godfather of the skinny jean" (BBC) he loved Hedi Slimane for his skin-tight pants and later Rick Owens for the sheer T-shirts.

Spectators always had the feeling that the clothing had to be tailored to his elastic gait and was rarely allowed to look like heavy ballast.

No awkward snapping of buckles and wrapping in sleeves.

Mick Jagger, that's always a singer just before the moment of the striptease.

Keith Richards

If Mick Jagger was the band's chameleon, guitarist Keith Richards has established himself as a stylistic constant: always weird. Richards never shed his playfulness, he wore belts, scarves and hats like a crazy peacock. The kohl pencil was his constant companion, like the cigarette in his mouth. When Johnny Depp got his famous pirate look for "The Pirates of the Caribbean", he thought of the Stones musician. It's only fitting that Richards was allowed to play his father in the film - in clothes that looked like those he usually wore on stage.

In Unzipped, designer Anna Sui recalls seeing four or five would-be Keiths strolling through New York in one day when she moved to Manhattan in the 1970s.

The same blonde strand in her hair, the same swaying step.

And then she saw the original one evening in a club, he was wearing a black and white striped satin suit, "the epitome of the outlaw," she said.

Who else can wear some kind of prison clothing without looking like a clown?