Music and Fashion

Fashion has been integral to musical performance practices, and music continues to influence fashion. As a result, specific music genres and practitioners are linked to particular fashion trends and movements that represent their persona and appearance. In various cultures around the world, music and fashion play a significant role in marking identity, as practitioners’ cultural heritage impacts the choice of costumes they wear during performances in different spaces and times. Spread through live performances and mass-mediated technology, consumers and fans of these practitioners also adopt and integrate these fashion trends into their everyday styles. This class explores Some of the questions: How does fashion become a visual representation of specific music cultures, subcultures, genres, movements, and artists? How does fashion reflect, influence, inspire, evolve, spread, sustain, represent, affect, and communicate musical ideas? To answer these questions, musical fashion icons such as Beyoncé, Prince, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and David Bowie, and genres like Hip Hop, rock, Opera, K-pop, Afrobeats, and other global genres are examined through written scholarships, analysis of music performances and costumes, and their appearances in events and everyday life. This class explores how fashion trends influence sounds and vice versa, how they mark identity through music, embody symbolic sounds, and attract music consumers and fans who perpetuate these trends.