Nashville is fortunate Manuel has chosen to make it his home-not only because of his prodigious talent as a fashion designer, or because of his world-wide acclaim as clothier to the stars, or because of his way with an embroidery needle and a rhinestone-but also because of the unique qualities of the man, at 66 ("because he likes the way it sounds") as boisterous, loving, fun-loving and hard-working as ever. Give Manuel a bottle of Cuervo Gold, and a gaggle of beautiful women on his arm, and ready he is to laugh and party the night away, and just as ready to wake up the next day ready to do what he loves most- turning fabric into art.

Thus, it is fitting that Nashville’s pre-eminent art museum, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, has honored Manuel with his first one-man couture show entitled “Star Spangled Couture”, which runs through March 13, 2005. It features 16 of the signature garments custom-designed and created by Manuel for such superstars as Johnny Cash, Marty Stewart, Gram Parsons, Elton John, Mike Mills of R.E.M., Dwight Yoakum and many others, including the recently spotted Little Richard entering Manuel’s shop. In addition, the heart of the exhibit honors a magnificent collection of 50 spectacularly designed state jackets, each featuring up to “8000, 10,000 rhinestones,” says Manuel, weighing 40 pounds, and including each state’s motto, flower, bird, and tree as well as other relevant-to-each-state imagery hand-chosen by Manuel.

These jackets were all created by the Mexican-born Manuel to honor his adopted country, the United States. Manuel tells Dish about the origin of the jackets, “I had kind of had a solitary thinking...everything has worked for me all the time. I came to this country and the doors opened for me one after the other, and it was a mixture of people who did this for me. So I asked myself, how am I going to pay this back? After thinking about this for months, maybe a year, I came up with an idea. ‘Why don’t I make 50 jackets? I’m going to make eight for each state, and give one jacket to each state each with all the information about the state that I can gather that identifies the state.’ So that was 1986 when I started working on this.”