STYLE TRACKING
On every great musician is a look that fires them up, fuels them, moves them forward and helps make the moment.
The brilliance and electricity of a pop star is in their music, their magic and, of course, their wardrobe. On every great musician is a look that fires them up, fuels them, moves them forward and helps make the moment, says Alison Veness.
We must start this story in the 1970s, a defining era when music really got into bed with fashion. Musicians were seeking out and working with designers who were experimenting and pushing the decorative boundaries of excess. Along with swirling illustrated prints, designers were subverting men’s fashion by using traditionally feminine details and fabrics and exploring more bodyconscious cutting and draping, all the while armed with a slew of sequins. It was an age of ‘let’s get the stage pumping’ flamboyance and, with its glam-rock glory, was arguably the last (until now) superexpressive fashion moment. It was a time when Freddie Mercury worked with Zandra Rhodes to create his costumes, which became embryonic prototypes for her later work. It was a time when a musician’s style was as much a part of their music as the songs themselves.
Fast-forward and music is now big business. Every house has its stars: Louis Vuitton has Drake, Gucci works with Florence Welch, Fendi is working with Nicki Minaj, A$AP Rocky likes his Calvin Klein, and Madonna loves Jeremy Scott’s Moschino. A concert stage is the runway and – for a lucky few – a place for new designers to gain notoriety and fast-track careers (if they can elbow past the fashion establishment).
One of the latest designers to dress a musician in his prime is Harris Reed. Stylist Harry Lambert discovered the London-based, Central Saint Martins (CSM) graduate after Reed’s non-gendered ‘The White Show 2016’ at CSM. Lambert commissioned the virtually unknown Reed to design a collection for Harry Styles to wear on tour. The look he came up with was the glam-rock’n’roll vibe of Mick Jagger (who originally perfected the look with then-unknown designer Ossie Clark in the early 1960s) that Styles loves to channel. Think flared pants, overflowing shirt ruffles and metallic, shining-so-bright tailored jackets – all sitting quite well alongside Alessandro Michele’s Gucci. Styles fronted the Gucci men’s tailoring campaigns in 2018, and Reed has gone on to befriend Alessandro Michele and walk for Gucci.
But back to the 70s … Seven years before David Bowie sang the anthem to our lives, “Fashion! Turn to the left. Fashion! Turn to the right. Oooh, fashion!”, he spied the relatively unknown designer Kansai Yamamoto. It was 1973 and two years since Yamamoto had shown as the first Japanese designer in London. Yamamoto’s design ethos was what we like to call ‘extra’. Influenced by basara, a Japanese concept that translates to ‘extravagance, eccentricity and excess’, it was the perfect fit for Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. And so Yamamoto created the Stardust star power – that hypnotic wide-legged vinyl jumpsuit, the one-legged bodysuit with glittering patterns, the superhero cape stamped with Japanese kanji characters. These were the costumes that transformed David Bowie into Ziggy Stardust and shot Yamamoto to the fashion stardom he’s still enjoying today. The designer recently collaborated with Nicolas Ghesquière on the Louis Vuitton 2018 Cruise collection.
Then there was Larry LeGaspi, whose intergalactic winged leather creations for Kiss and soul trio Labelle stuck in the mind of Rick Owens, who has dedicated a book and a whole runway collection to the late designer and his ability to push fashion through the stage. “For me, as a teenager growing up in Porterville, California, what Larry LeGaspi did was a huge thing – the way he infiltrated Middle America with this subversive sensibility,” Owens told Vogue Runway.
Across the pond in London, punk unleashed its mighty rebellion. In 1974, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were running their
infamous and outrageous Sex boutique on Kings Road. Sex empowered and fuelled the punk movement, giving it bite. They dressed the Sex Pistols in low-waisted slick tight leather pants, beaten-up ripped T-shirts and Teddy Boy suits. And they dressed Bow Wow Wow’s 13-year-old Annabella Lwin, who rocked roughed-up sleeveless T-shirts, vests and a slew of safety pins that screamed ‘Destroy’ and ‘Scum’. She wore early, pre-Vivienne Westwood on the cover of Bow Wow Wow’s first EP, Your Cassette Pet. It became a revolution led by McLaren and Westwood and heard by musicians all over the world.
In New York circa 1975, Blondie’s Debbie Harry was working with Stephen Sprouse, who was at Halston. The singer started wearing Halston matt silk jersey slip dresses, and has said that one of her favourite looks was a trench coat with a little black dress underneath, worn with thighhigh boots and a beret, which became the new girl-in-rock’s uniform.
Halston’s signature psychedelic fluorescent prints on stretchy jumpsuits became part of the Sprouse/Blondie language. This brought a new energy to the NYC 80s rock scene. Sprouse went on to work with musicians including Duran Duran and Billy Idol, and then with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton in 2000, creating the memorable Graffiti bag. (He also worked with NASA, but that’s another story.)
In 2011, Debbie Harry told W: “Rock’n’roll started out with music being the total thing. It wasn’t what it’s evolved into now, where the visual presentation is so important. Now it’s pretty grandiose. The women are actually showgirls who do music.”
But the best do and still are both. Lady Gaga’s relationship with designer Brandon Maxwell is perhaps the textbook modern-day fashion love story. He’s known as the man who moved Gaga on from that infamous meat dress. After assisting stylists for six years, namely Nicola Formichetti, who had been styling Gaga, Maxwell launched his own label in 2015. He went on to transform Gaga’s style, streamlining her looks. It was the year leading up to, and the year of, her stripped-back new classic album Joanne, a Gaga moment that people will remember as much for its ballads as its sleek suits (sometimes gown hybrids), Stetson hat, structured jumpsuits and a lot of monochrome. Gaga put Maxwell on the fashion map; he now shows seasonally during New York Fashion Week.
And the one we love to love, Vogue cover star Rihanna, has the ultimate swag and sass. When stylist Alastair McKimm discovered Parsons’s Matthew Dolan at his graduate presentation in 2014, he showed Dolan’s clothes to Rihanna. His designs helped establish her super-utilitarian style: oversized denim jackets, tailored suit jackets and big-belted, dramatically wide-legged pants. Clothes for a boss businesswoman. That’s what we like, not to mention that she had a hand in lifting up another local talent, Discount Universe, a stage-ready label loved by fellow musicians Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry.
“That Rihanna reign just won’t let up” is still true 10 years after Bad Gal RiRi sang those words. And so it continues. Successful soundtracking fashion lies in the power of one mega music talent managing to snag a designer who, in turn, manages to be in the moment – mirroring society and refracting fashion into a new stratosphere. Together, they sometimes make the Zeitgeist, which in their hands is like the Holy Grail. And although it’s harder in 2019 to gauge instantly what kind of music someone is into by the way they dress, tribes are still there, soundwaves are forming. You’ve just got to listen and look harder.
A concert stage is the runway and a place for new designers to gain notoriety and fast-track careers