Marie Antoinette (US 2006 Sofia Coppola) got me thinking about the correlations between sound and image, and how fashion aesthetics are often deliberately linked with or directly associated with musical movements.
In the 1980s for example, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ensured that their punk fashion aesthetic (which was ironically incredibly expensive and in this regard completely antithetical to the punk movement) was associated with the music of the Sex Pistols. (McLaren was managing the Sex Pistols – a nice fusion of goals).
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From Westwood’s fashion collection from 1976-1980:
Text from the V&A Museum in London (which held a retrospective of Westwood’s work in 2004, which travelled to Australia – NGA, Canberra - in January 2005): “McLaren was now manager of the Sex Pistols and a key figure in the emerging Punk Rock phenomenon. The Seditionaries collection was an audacious fusion of all the subversive elements in Westwood and McLaren’s recent work. There were the ripped garments of 1950s pin-ups; the leather, chains and badges of the bikers; the straps and buckles of the fetishists. As Westwood said, ‘You couldn’t imagine the Punk Rock thing without the clothing.”
More recently, the Klaxons jokingly referred to their aesthetic as “new rave”, unwittingly spawning a huge following and coining a phrase to describe this new aesthetic that again straddles the (increasingly slim in some regards) divide between music and fashion.
The Klaxons provide this archetypal example of their “new rave” aesthetic in this film clip for their song “Atlantis to Interzone“. Here’s another example of their work that has a number of references to Vivienne Westwood’s early work – all black imitation-leather and faux buckles etc.
Arguably, New Young Pony Club have contributed one of the best other example’s to the genre with this video for their song “Ice Cream“. The first 40 seconds of this clip are sublime. The eroticisation, the gaudy colour scheme – all fluro and pastel complimentary and clashing colours, and the use of sugary sweet garish coloured foodstuffs reminds me very much of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. The great thing about New Young Pony Club is that this clip pushes the aesthetic to into the realm kitsch – its a licorice all-sorts look.
