Gone are the days when musicians would dress according to their stylists; Today's studio artists have moved seamlessly between the worlds of fashion and music, creating their own successful product lines and leveraging their influence to reach new audiences.
Close your eyes and think back to any music superstar of the last century, and you can probably imagine what they looked like. Mick Jagger would wear printed silk, Billie Holiday would wear gardenias in her hair, David Bowie would wear glam rock sequins, Blondie would wear sunglasses, Lil' Kim would wear a rainbow-colored wig, Amy Winehouse, with her beehive hair, wears a miniskirt. Seriously, you definitely want it.
Music has an image, sound has a style. So, after all these years of evolution, it's not so surprising that two different worlds would gradually become entangled; What started as music brand ambassadors entering the fashion arena is now a whole generation of artists becoming their own designers.
Rihanna, for example, is both the first woman to create her own label at LVMH and the first black person to do so, on a par with Dior, Fendi and Louis Vuitton.
And in others, a similar symphony played out: Zendaya wearing TommyHilfiger at Paris Fashion Week, cult nightclub superstar Honey Dijon launching a co-label with Comme des Garcons, For example, South Korean DJ Peggy Gou joined the ranks of Off-White (Virgil Abloh is also a DJ of this brand) and launched the Kirin brand under the brand. Not to mention KanyeWest's Yeezy, which is now worth $1.5 billion.
Why do these things keep happening? In fact, in the process of turning fashion into a multibillion-dollar industry, some designers have become rock stars themselves; Think of JohnGalliano, Gianni Versace, Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, whose collections, advertising campaigns, and beauty products are their best-selling singles and albums.In the past, musicians were simply fashion ambassadors, given the chance to sit in the front row of a circle or star in an advertisement for a well-known brand, happy to use the paparazzi to endorse a product. Now, they have mastered their fan base and built a product, not just advertised it.
In other words, you can now follow Rihanna on social media, track her music through various music streaming apps, wear her Fenty tannins, buy her makeup at Harvey Nichols, and even fall asleep in her Savage x Fenty pajamas.
All ethnic groups are taken care of (she even covers all skin tones - her FentyBeauty foundation has 40 shades of light and dark). As fashion has increasingly focused on direct-to-consumer sales, the streaming model of the music industry has naturally leveraged the power of forward-looking brands to transform itself into a disruptive spirit.
"You don't need to wait six months, you can buy what you see right now." Rihanna told Vogue at the Fenty fashion show in Paris. She noticed that her products were instantly available through Fenty.com.
"There's no need for gimmicks. You see it, you like it, you want it. I just love that. I want to buy things right away." Such a strategy is unprecedented for fashion's largest and possibly most traditional group. "I am grateful to LVMH for being so flexible and willing to let me present the way I present my products through different ideas,"
"She added. "Mr. Arnault (Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH) is very intelligent and open-minded."
In the first Streetwear Impact Report published last week by Hypebeast, a majority (65 percent) of the 40,096 fashion enthusiasts surveyed identified musicians as the most credible representatives of street fashion. Because he shows cultural impact beyond social media."
More than half said the influence of industry insiders was most assured, while only 32 percent attributed the credit to the sales power of powerful people. LVMH realized Rihanna's unique sales power in 2017, when FentyBeauty (owned by LVMH's Kendo beauty brand) had just released its first product. In just one month, it sold $72 million worth of products.
There's no question that Rihanna has box office appeal, but her rise in fashion resonates with a dramatic shift in consumer demand for diversity and inclusion.
Rihanna, Kanye, Virgil Abloh - not all of whom happen to be people of color - are reinventing what it means to be a fashion designer and touching on the subcultural connection between music and style.
They follow in the footsteps of P Diddy, Jay-Z and Beyonce, all of whom have ventured into the apparel space in an attempt to create a common market, a large and often overlooked community of people of color.
If you put the creative process of the album and the fashion product together, there is another contrast. For Abloh, LouisVuitton's menswear artistic director, his background as a DJ points the way to fashion: sampling classics, moving from genre to genre, creating something both original and fresh.
"Being a DJ is like going to the stadium, but creating a line of merchandise is like going to the Olympics." He told iD earlier this year. "When you're a DJ, it's the same part of your brain that goes into fashion design, where you want to get a room full of people to agree and have fun with that consensus."
This new wave of musician-turned-designers can't tailor or take classes at CentralSaint Martins, but does it matter? Of course not.
"As consumers, it's easy to limit what we can imagine of other people, but the person who designed the iPhone can also be a good architect, and vice versa." "Said Benji B. He was a DJ on Radio 1, worked with Virgil for almost 15 years, and is now Louis Vuitton's official music director. He has worked with Celine's Phoebe Philo in the past and noticed how important music is in a stage show.
"There was a history of artists not wanting to be limited to one medium, and now when I look at my interns, almost all of them know how to use music programs, and they know how to use Photoshop or InDesign. People no longer have to live by the definition of linearity."
For millions of avid fans of these artists and DJS, it's like music to the ear.
