The culture of fashion: how the catwalk soundtrack got its groove
Models! Clothes! Music! Fashion show soundtracks are increasingly part of shaping a brand’s identity. And in the digital era they’re about to become even more important…
The year was 2017. Kim Jones was menswear artistic director at Louis Vuitton. At the appointed hour, his first models sloped onto the Paris runway in iterations of slouchy 80s overcoats, baggy flannel trousers and Basquiat-style suits with untucked shirts. Then the kicker – internet-breaking Speedy holdalls emblazoned with red-and-white Supreme logos. And to add the crucial fourth musical dimension: Honey Dijon’s mix of Sound Factory bangers including Chez Damier’s Can You Feel It (MK Dub), completing the downtown New York nostalgia trip.
Since then, other notable catwalk soundtracks have included LaQuan Smith’s AW23 Ballroom fabulosity-fest; Benji B’s eerie David Lynch-like Chromatics mix for Jil Sander SS25 and Saint Laurent’s long-term music collaboration with DJ SebastiAn – so integral to the brand, they packaged it as a box set and sold it in Saint Laurent stores. Plus, who can forget the influence of Christopher Bailey’s Burberry shows, among the first to be live-streamed, with live music performances instantly downloadable on iTunes. (I was there for Ilan Eshkeri’s ‘Reliquary’ 21-piece orchestral performance – I still haven’t recovered.)
In the ephemeral 60-second Reels era, it’s the musical soundscape that wields the power to arouse unforgettable emotion. If you’re struggling to imagine how great those soundtracks are, don’t worry. Chances are they’ve been carefully preserved for posterity on the platform of your choice – let’s just say you’re nobody if you don’t have your catwalk music on Bandcamp, iTunes or Spotify. And what better way to sashay through your 8am commute than to a belting 20-minute runway mix?
In the 21st century, we no longer just buy fashion, we buy into a Fashion Moment, a knowing nod, a viral extravaganza of belonging. High fashion has equal billing with low-brow pop culture and mass entertainment. Today’s fashion show isn’t just a ‘show’. From Karl Lagerfeld’s infamously OTT Chanel set designs to Pharrell Williams’ debut menswear show for Louis Vuitton (that shut down an entire Paris bridge), it’s a monumental happening. And beyond supermodels, sets and lighting, music is the democratic ingredient that brings it to an even wider public.
Example: In January last year, John Galliano (with the help of his best friend and music co-conspirator of 40-odd years, Jeremy Healy) achieved the unthinkable with his Spring 24 couture collection for Maison Margiela Artisanal. A theatrical mise-en-scène featuring extreme silhouettes and mesmerising choreography not seen since his days at Dior, Galliano briefed Healy to accompany his Brassai-esque fantasy-slash-nightmare with a highly emotive Adele recording of George Michael’s Fast Love. The combination of Galliano’s trademark costume drama, scenography, choreography, Adele and George Michael – plus some additional orchestration to create “a 22-minute opus” – resulted in the kind of TikTok virality usually reserved for megabrands with mega budgets.
But Healy has long been an originator of this all-in approach to fashion show music. “In many ways it was the culmination of 40 years, similar to our first Galliano show. It definitely had the same sort of vibe about it,” he says. “In the early days it was more club-based music, because John was an ardent clubber and dance music was kind of cutting edge in the early 90s. [Now] sometimes he’ll give me a story about a character and what they’re like. We’re really creating a mini film, with models as actresses and characters. It could be based around a Russian aristocrat or something and then I’d go and research Russian music or periods. Then I’d look to see how you can make that contemporary. It’s the same method we’ve been using since the start, it’s just the tools are getting sharper.”
Visually captivating and musically immersive fashion shows are hardly new. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s AW83 Nostalgia of Mud collection with its styling inspired by the chopped-up samples of early hip-hop is considered one of the 20th century’s most influential collections. And BodyMap’s 1980s shows facilitated by Jeffrey Hinton’s music mashups and Michael Clark’s choreography have become lore in the history of British fashion.
“The music Malcolm used for the shows were a kind of demo for his own musical endeavours. He used it as an experiment to see what reaction he’d get from the fashion glitterati; the people who would influence trends and the people who were looking for something new,” says visual artist and video director Nick Egan, who helped McLaren compile the music selection. (Do check out his documentary film, Creative Vandal.)
“Malcolm had realised just how important music and fashion were to emerging youth cultures. The Nostalgia of Mud collection is great because you can track where Malcolm was headed to with his Duck Rock album, using the original square dance Buffalo Gals and some of the Central American music. It was all about dancing via different cultures. This was what he used as a demo for Duck Rock which he had only just started to record. Then the Punkature and Witches collections took it from multicultural to mixing hip-hop with opera and classical. Just by placing a Puccini opera over the top of Salsa Smurph was masterful and in fact, mixing dance music with classical music has now almost become a fashion staple.”
Yes indeed. A decade later, John Galliano and his Dior cohorts arguably made fashion shows a spectacle well before Karl Lagerfeld’s ambitious productions raised the bar at Chanel.
“Fashion shows today are like cinematic experiences whereas in the 80s they were more like performance art,” says DJ and curator Martin Green while showing me around his must-see exhibition, OUTLAWS: Fashion Renegades of 80s London at The Fashion & Textile Museum [which closes this weekend!]. “BodyMap for example had these incredibly exuberant shows, choreographed by Michael Clark with club music from Jeffrey Hinton. It was called the BodyMap family, so there were models and then there were friends, club people, all mixed together.”
The charm came from its rough and ready post-punk spirit (and quite possibly the lack of budget). The diverse model casting featured everyone from Barry and Nick Kamen to Boy George, John Maybury, Michael Clark, designer Stevie Smith’s mum, print designer Hilde Smith and various kids. Jeffrey Hinton would play cassettes in real time, improvising with a faster track if models were walking too slowly.
“A lot of the time the music in the 80s shows was quite crazy, much more eccentric,” says Green. “Now, the shows are Hollywood spectacles. At the end of the day they’re selling sportswear. Today in clubs you don’t see people wearing crazy catwalk clothes but then, people wore them out. Because the designers were friends with the people running the clubs, models were friends of the designers, and friends of designers were in the shows. So it was a real community, a creative ecosystem.”
In an article on ‘the Marvelization of fashion’, The Washington Post referenced the cultural critic Sigfried Kracover’s observation of the development of 1920s Berlin cinemas as “palaces of distraction” and “shrines to the cultivation of pleasure”. Today, the Post suggests, our phones hold that power. “It is from our phones that we understand fashion, even as clothes are something to be experienced in three dimensions, in motion, in reality,” writes Rachel Tashjian. No surprise then, that to counter the cold, flat experience of a social media-streamed fashion show, we respond to the emotional warmth of human voices – particularly IRL, breathing ones.
Live choirs continue to be an eternal hit at fashion shows, both for the aural pleasure of many human voices and the visual delight of a group of singers spreading unbridled joy. The value outweighs the cost. Pharrell Williams’ exclusively penned track “Joy”, performed by Voices of Fire was arguably the highlight of his debut Louis Vuitton men’s show, while in 2001 John Galliano and Jeremy Healy staged a Dior fashion show involving transporting an 80-piece gospel choir from London to Paris.
“When I was a kid living in Peckham you could hear this gospel choir on Sunday mornings just echoing down the streets. It really affected me,” says Healy. “I said to John, ‘it’d be great one day to do this’. And literally 15 years later he said, ‘Jeremy it’s time to do the gospel choir!’” Yet, when Healy presented Dior’s CEO with the £80K invoice, “he just looked at me and went, ‘I’m not paying that!’ I said, ‘yes you bloody are’. And he did pay it. We did the show with the choir all behind gauze and lit so that they suddenly appeared like magic, which was a genius way to do it. But Dior were back-pedalling about music because they were not selling music. It was definitely a sign of things to come and now [companies] understand its worth.”
It only took 25 years, but the rise of the music-artist-consultant-DJ has also demonstrated their value as a crucial part of brand world-building. From Virgil Abloh and Pharrell Williams’ origins in music to their roles as Louis Vuitton creative directors, to Chanel-bedecked K-Pop stars causing roadblocks at the Paris Couture; from Jeff Mills starring in a Jil Sander campaign to Honey Dijon’s Comme des Garcons-backed fashion line Honey Fucking Dijon, the future is written. The music masters are finally realising they’re worth their weight in gold as essential tastemakers in sound and vision.
This feature can be found in print in the latest issue of Faith Fanzine, available free (just pay postage) from HERE.
CORRECTION: The print edition mistakenly quotes Rachel Tashjian as a Wall Street Journal journalist. It is corrected here as The Washington Post.
WORDS: Disneyrollergirl / Navaz Batliwalla
IMAGES: Michael Clark performing in a BodyMap fashion show by Robert Rosen courtesy BodyMap; Michael Clark performing in a BodyMap fashion show, courtesy BodyMap; Faith Fanzine x2
NOTE: Most images are digitally enhanced. Some posts use affiliate links and PR samples. Please read my privacy and cookies policy here
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