By Amanda Giroux

How The Fashion Choices Of Musicians Influence What We Wear

Music is art. Fashion is art. Could it be possible that these two types of artworks go together?

This artwork around us shapes us as humans. Music is played everywhere— In cars, in restaurants, in stores, in our homes. But fashion is also omnipresent in our daily lives. We can see it when we travel, looking at the fashion of people also in restaurants, stores, or in our homes. Popular musicians have influenced what we wear in our daily lives for the past few decades, and they continue to do that today.

I once took a class called “Popular Music From The 1980s To Now,” learning how artists and their music relate to people. The professor of that class taught us that humans are musical beings. I believe that humans are fashionable beings, as well. Even those who do not think so still choose every day the clothes they clad their bodies with.

In some ways, musical genres have their own set of fashion categories.

It was common for young people to classify themselves and their fellow peers by the music they listened to in the past and still today. Rock artists, such as Joan Jett or Gene Simmons of the band Kiss, are notorious for wearing lots of black— black eyeliner, black jewelry, and black leather. Pop singers like Michael Jackson can be known to wear more color, dressing authentically and originally to intrigue fans. Grunge musicians like Kurt Cobain wore more baggy clothing, steering more towards a “skater” style of apparel that can feature long, disheveled hair, unbuttoned plaid shirts, oversized jackets, and sometimes beanie hats. Like Prince or Annie Lennox of the band Eurythmics, other artists as well have drawn more attention to their music because of the way they dress, styling themselves androgynously. 

Nowadays, musical genres blend into other styles. Styles of rap infuse southern-style country music with hip-hop elements in songs like “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X or “The Git Up” by Blanco Brown. Techno music has transgressed to electronic dance music, or EDM songs, with computerized beats and sound bytes, most often recognizable by minimal singing in a song like “Summer” by DJ Calvin Harris. Gospel, jazz, and rock instruments can be commonly found throughout pop music. Singer-songwriter Sam Smith layers their vocals together to sound like a gospel choir in their songs. Pop artist Miley Cyrus’s music features guitars, drums, among other instruments associated with rock n’ roll. The top music charts are ranked with songs that include but are not limited to any of these options.

Artwork like this influences our culture as some of us like to dress like the singers we are currently listening to.

Musical artists such as those listed above can be known to follow and set fashion trends, but the fantastic thing about fashion is that people are not limited to the boundaries of one style. People can dress in a particular style one day and change it the next. The fashion style of the 2020s is diverse and versatile, and musicians indeed pave the way for this.

Harry Styles is an English musician with a rock-oriented music style and a personal style that can be described as a “gender-neutral business professional” fashion style. Earlier in his career, his clothing style reflected what he wore with his former bandmates when he was a part of the boyband, One Direction. He is often seen now wearing jewelry, nail polish, formal blouses, blazers, pants, and skirts. The fashion world has taken notice as he recently became the first male ever to have a solo Vogue Magazine cover. Styles’ apparel choices move fashion towards eradicating gender-discrimination of clothing and allowing everyone to dress more freely without the labels. 

Ariana Grande, an American pop vocalist and Broadway singer, also has a style that is reflective of her music. It is colorful, modern, and girly. For example, Grande wore a custom Giambattista Valli blue-grey tulle dress with gloves at the 2020 Grammy Award Ceremony, looking like an actual princess. She often wears clothes consisting of short, cropped tops and high waisted bottoms. But other times, she wears oversized sweatshirts, pairing them with thigh-high boots, and usually can be found in her iconic winged-eyeliner, including her signature high ponytail. These style choices are trends that young women, like myself, dress like.

On a different side of the spectrum fashion-wise, Billie Eilish is an American singer-songwriter who became famous when she released a song on SoundCloud in 2016. Her music genre can be described as indie/alternative, a lesser-known music style that has recently become mainstream, but this music style is also representative of her clothing choices. Eilish typically dresses within a similar color scheme, along with her music, usually staying within a similar sound. Most often, she wears baggy, oversized clothing and dyes her hair frequently, which at one point was a gray color but more recently a jet-black color with patches of green. This fashion style is a loosely progressive version of modern-day grunge and alternative dressing— What used to be gothic and considered inappropriate and unprofessional is now a much more widely accepted and popularized style.

Music and art are fashion forms that work together to influence people and those around them. In the world today, artists are becoming more like Harry Styles, dressing in formal wear of skirts and pants, while pushing society towards removing labels of gender from fashion. Pop singer Ariana Grande dresses proudly feminine, allowing young women to highlight their feminine features in the way they dress as well. On the other hand, Billie Eilish dresses in loose clothing and colored hair dye, bringing a formerly frowned upon sense of style to a positive light. The possibilities are endless when the worlds of fashion and music collide. Who knows what style, music or fashion, is next?