11 RINA SAWAYAMA

LAST YEAR

19

AS ROLLING STONE’S Rob Sheffield said in his rave review of her 2022 album, Hold That Girl: “Rina Sawayama is everything you could pray for in a pop provocateur: rude, audacious, unpredictable, hilarious, blunt, with a mean streak and an omnivorous ear.” The same could be said of the Anglo Japanese singer-songwriter’s fashion sense. She effortlessly shape-shifts into whatever she wants you to see. From taking the stage in a polka-dot alien piece by Jean Paul Gaultier for The Tonight

Show to looking cowboy chic in Dion

Lee, Sawayama has the enviable ability to make anything her own. “When I first started out, I was very much in control of my image,” she said in a conversation with Shania Twain for Rolling Stone’s recent Musicians on Musicians issue. “I didn’t have any pictures from fans that were unflattering. I was trying to make sure that I look hot in everything.” Of course, the thought of a “bad” Sawayama photo is comical — whether she’s wearing Schiaparelli in the front row of Paris Fashion Week or Diesel behind the scenes during tour rehearsals. Even in her most self-consciously outlandish looks —like the archival Vivienne Westwood jumpsuit and feather boa she wore in what stylist Jordan Kelsey called “full homage to one of Elton’s amazing costumes over the years from Bob Mackie” — she always seems completely in her element.