Is there a musician that changed the way you think about your personal style?
Benjamin Edgar
Pete Doherty
While I've never really dressed like him or even aspired for his look, aside from the years of Hedi's Dior Homme denim that he wore - considerably better than I did, I've always been a specific fan of the mid-2000's era Pete Doherty look. There are likely all sorts of British nods and nuances in what he chose to wear that I'll never understand. Instead as an outsider, what always got me is how he can embody the word "louche" in such a perfect way. Semi-simple beautiful fabrics, just enough wear and tear, lanky if not perfectly ill-fitting, just a bit "off" in such a luxurious way. Thought, most important—he wore the clothes rather than the clothes wearing him.
Elliott Foos
Ian Curtis
The drummer in my first band, John, introduced me to Joy Division. Rural American life in Western New York felt harmonious to the dark, dissonant melodies Ian Curtis et al created and in them, like many before us, we found a likeness.
Plenty of writers have said plenty on Ian Curtis’ style, but while in a very formative stage, I had been gifted a pillar of culture to study. John was keen to mention that Curtis was on to something beyond the music, he was crafting an ethos, and style played an integral role. It’s known that Curtis was thinking macroscopic, holding stars like Bowie in high regard while actively working to subvert the stylistic cues of both popular and punk music at the time. He was accomplishing a rebellion of the contemporary iconography of stardom through utilitarian, quotidian working class aesthetic.
In this I found a template of style, one that didn’t need designer, but rather a good cut. One that could stand out in spite of its ubiquity, and say something without saying everything. Style concealing an element of surprise- a dress shirt, trousers and polished shoes performing “Isolation” in a punk club.
Frances Mize
Kate Bush
“Dressing Askance”
I grew up with a fabulous, understated mother who knows the value of coherence and logic in fashion. What you wear is supposed to both look good and make sense (not necessarily “sense” in a completely practical way, my sisters and I all got monogrammed tissue box covers for Christmas, but visually at least). So in an impulse of defiance that is still too early to deem immature or justified, I’ve begun to find myself attracted to outfits that simply don’t make sense.
That’s also how I began listening to Kate Bush, whose music makes one’s own life seem a little more disorderly, or excitingly obscure. She’s at once totally bizarre and totally serious, however if you’re not in the right transcendental mindset, it becomes easy to think of her as silly. Listen to Kate Bush on an ordinary day in the library and the fabric of your existence sort of restitiches itself.
Most of Kate’s looks are altogether impractical, and unfortunately for us, unattainable. It would be hard to pull of her black veil, upright bass combo in the video for “Babooshka,” or the tasseled, full body quilted equestrian get up that she wears leaping through a delipidated barn/heavenscape from “Suspended in Gaffa” - but she does have moments in which she steps back onto earth and shows us the sartorial way from our own level.
I remain firmly rooted in my mother’s good-looking good sense. Yet Kate showed me that there is value in wearing something a little offbeat, like a pair of tie-dyed Levi’s a lá Lulu Graham or green Dickie’s coveralls to a summer solstice party (that was me, and that was maybe verging on the ridiculous - I’m still practicing). My favorite is her outfit in “Them Heavy People”: a fitted black tank, fantastic purple silk wrap skirt, all bizarrely paired with a straw fedora. It’s so close to being standard chic, but she reminds us that maybe that’s no fun anyway. There’s some style magic in the strange.
