Fashion + Music: Fashion Creatives Shaping Pop Culture
Fashion and music are formidable forces: entrancing, bewildering, identity-affirming, panic- inducing, tribe-forming, arguably life-saving and indisputably two of the finest playgrounds for indulging creative vision. As such, it rarely gets more exciting than when the two collide. Fashion + Music: Fashion Creatives Shaping Pop Culture, published by Laurence King, is a celebratory exploration of how fashion + music, as twin agents of creative expression, have long had a powerful mutual attraction, and of how fashion has consistently amplified our understanding of the band, and in many cases the brand.
While the relationship has been in play for some time, it has never been more significant than it is now. In the digital era, powered by visual soundbites, with pop videos, album art, stage looks and street-style shots distributed, devoured and dissected across the globe in nanoseconds, image means everything. Music may be the foundation, but fashion and the larger-than-life personae it creates have become the glue that binds sound, style and attitude, confirming the creative intent and ensuring that the audience remains captivated.
From music videos to editorial shoots, and from ad campaigns to stage shows, via the evolution of some of the industry’s most significant, often era-defining collaborations, this book focuses on the power of the fashion–music synthesis, as agent for reflection but also for change. A socio-pop-cultural journey through territories including identity, feminism, gender, sexuality (and sexual politics), cultural appropriation and the impact of Internet culture on the way we communicate, concoct, perceive and represent our ideas, it’s an essential reference for anyone interested in fashion’s role as a medium with which to innovate, communicate and seduce.
Foreword by Professor Frances Corner OBE. Publication date: August 2016.
