Tiffany Briseno
Tiffany Briseno’s career at the intersection of fashion and music might seem preordained. Her father, a Mexican drummer, played with Carlos Santana, and both she and her mother are former models. After 17 years as a choreographer, she studied fashion design, which led to styling, which led to her big break: dressing Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes.
“We came together doing his Stitches music video when he was 16,” says Briseno. “That opened up my horizon in celebrity styling and menswear styling, specifically.” Eight years later, Mendes is a global superstar and the youngest male artist to top the Billboard 200 with four studio albums, and Briseno has remained his key image maker. “I was the first person who got him to wear a leather jacket,” she says, adding with a laugh: “Prior to this, he was in flannels.”
Briseno has carefully mapped out Mendes’s sartorial evolution. “I’m really into creating characters and a story arc in everything,” she says. “So that’s something that we spoke about, even early on. Who are you in this album cycle? What is our messaging?” After persuading him to wear the leather All Saints jacket for Stitches – to bring out his “bad-boy grit” – Briseno developed the look into a more pronounced rockstar style for Illuminate and his selftitled album and then moved into a 1940s aesthetic for his most recent album, Wonder, released in 2020.
“They are celebrities so, to me, they’re a walking billboard,” says Briseno. “There has to be strategy behind what we choose.” She begins with a mood board as well as a list of brands to target. After a client has worn a label three or four times for big events, she says, it becomes easier to ask for bespoke commissions. “I’ll go back to Louis Vuitton or Saint Laurent or whoever and pitch them sketches and design ideas. It’s sort of a backand-forth.” The process takes months of planning, often for a single outfit.
Recently, she’s been focusing on tailored suiting for Mendes, channelling James Dean and Jimi Hendrix. He wore a custom three-piece maroon Louis Vuitton suit designed by Virgil Abloh – accented with a gold-and-pearl chain handcrafted by Briseno – to 2020’s Grammy Awards. And for the Met Gala in May, he arrived in a navy-and-maroon Tommy Hilfiger suit and overcoat made from upcycled fabric, which announced a sustainablefashion-line collaboration between Mendes and the brand.
Those ensembles seem conservative compared to what Briseno is cooking up for her next big act, rising star Kane Brown, who in August became the first male country-music artist to perform at the MTV Video Music Awards. She describes the vision behind his get-up as “Japanese streetwear meets 1980s NASCAR in custom-colour blocks” – a look that likely won’t soon be forgotten. And that’s precisely the point.
“They are celebrities so, to me, they’re a walking billboard. There has to be strategy behind what we choose.”