The Rolling Stones reissue provocative Warhol-designed album cover

When you realise the Rolling Stones are in their sixth decade of music making it’s somewhat shocking Andy Warhol’s model for their Sticky Fingers album cover is still shrouded in mystery. To honour their septuagenarian status the Rolling Stones have just rereleased the classic 1971 album. Featuring hits like Brown Sugar and Wild Horses, the remastered and expanded Sticky Fingers bears its original Andy Warhol-designed bulging blue jeans cover with working zipper.

At a party in 1969, Andy Warhol told Mick Jagger in his off-hand way it might be fun to have a real zipper on a record sleeve. Never one to shy away from his sexuality, it is no surprise snake-hipped lothario Jagger was right behind this, and a year later he suggested the idea for Sticky Fingers. The fulsome cover of a man’s crotch clad in tight jeans riffs off the innuendo of the album’s title and opens to reveal a Warhol Polaroid of white briefs. Along with the artist’s equally phallic, equally iconic banana cover for The Velvet Underground, the Sticky Fingers cover is an enduring example of imaginative and provocative packaging and has joined the ranks of album design mythology.