June 19, 2025 |
I wasn’t in Paris for Miu Miu’s SS23 show. I was meant to be, but an awkward turn of personal circumstance that I don’t quite care to divulge here saw me watching it from the subs bench – or rather, via the livestream from my Stoke Newington sofa. It was probably for the best, though, given the blubbing mess I found myself in upon its close.
That was, in part, for the collection itself, one that consolidated Mrs Prada and Lotta Volkova’s ever-developing dialogue, anchored in an elegantly askew reappraisal of prosaic dressing. Rather than the chicly shabby layering of thin jerseys, leather skirts with bulky cargo pockets or those instant-must-have sock-thong-boots, though, it was the audiovisual environment that jerked my tears. With the help of Rem Koolhaas’s AMO – Prada’s de facto architectural partner – the colonnaded hall of Palais d’Iéna was transformed by Berlin-based Chinese artist Shuang Li. Miuccia’s girls, Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid and FKA twigs among their ranks, stepped out from under screens beaming visions of wind turbines against an apocalyptic sun, sharks and stars tumbling through the space, and strode along seating banks that echoed the undersea communication cables that make up the internet’s physical infrastructure.
What gave the moment its affective propulsion, though, was the soundscape: a sequence of glitched-out sonic chapters compiled by producer/DJ Eli Osheyack, interspersed with stirring monologue by Li. Over its 12-minute course, it flitted between jangly breakbeats carried along by a revving bassline and chipmunk vocals, a chaotically chopped xylophone arrangement and the bit that really tugged at my heartstrings around the four-and-a-half-minute mark: mournful human wails over what sounded like a vocoder choral arrangement.
Why I’m so touched by it remains something of an enigma. This, in my eyes, is a mark of its success as an artwork. But if I were to attempt to say why, I’d boil it down to its embodiment of both the collection and a high-energy innocence, sweet melancholy and sense of deferred meaning. “The show is about communication, its glitches and impossibilities,” Osheyack says. “Shuang talked a lot about how our seemingly modern global network is fragile and our attempts at digital connectivity often fail us, so I tried to fit pieces of music or sound design in the gaps of the script, as if they were lost transmissions.”
Osheyack’s example is particular in so far as he was responding to a creative brief set by a guest artist, rather than Mrs Prada herself. Still, the integral role it played in contextualising the collection speaks of the crucial function that sound plays in fashion. That said, trying to develop a formula for a ‘successful’ show soundtrack is a moot exercise. “There’s a hard-to-explain alchemy that happens between set, design, venue, collection – the theatre of it all – and the music,” says Benji B, the British DJ, producer and presenter, and one of fashion’s most prolific sonic architects. “It’s just like in a movie, really.”
Benji’s comparison is warranted, particularly given that he is behind some of the most cinematic moments in contemporary fashion history, such as the live orchestral arrangement he ‘DJed’ for Virgil Abloh’s third show while at the helm of Louis Vuitton menswear on a sun-bathed Place Dauphine and the all-Mary J. Blige soundscape for Phoebe Philo’s Celine swan song. In each example, the musical backdrop gave vital emotional texture to the visual scene. As he concedes, though, what perhaps sets a fashion show apart from a film is the peculiarity of its relationship to time. “A fashion show is a unique context due to the environment, the setting, but also the time span, which is usually anything from eight to 15 minutes. It’s a very specific arc of time to play music in,” says Benji. “Space-time reality is different during a runway show. Two minutes of the wrong music in a fashion show can feel like 20 minutes.”
Indeed, the fashion show is one of the most ubiquitous, robust examples of the Gesamtkunstwerk: a total work of art. When competently executed, it can embody performance, sculpture, often video and, yes, sound, suspending the realities of those lucky enough to behold them for their duration and plausibly submerging them in new ones. Few designers have done that quite as consistently as John Galliano, who for more than 35 years has artfully demonstrated the alchemy Benji is talking about. The world was most recently reminded of that in his instantly canonised final show for Maison Margiela last year, with the memory of Gwendoline Christie and Nyakier Buong’s broken-doll stagger to toybox tinkles and Adele’s Hometown Glory scorched into the fashion imagination.
Leon Dame modelling at John Galliano’s final show for Maison Margiela, Leon Dame modelling at John Galliano’s final show for Maison Margiela, where the soundtrack included toybox tinkles and Adele’s ‘Hometown Glory’
Perhaps the best examples in Galliano’s pantheon of spectacles, though, are those he staged while at the helm of Dior. To choose one show is to kill an unforgivable number of darlings, but if I must, it is his AW03 haute couture collection. That is in significant part because it drew direct inspiration from music – or more accurately its sororal art form: dance. It opened with a parade of models in tightly corseted gowns that exploded into cascades of lurid ruffles at the thigh, outfitted with velvet boleros, jaunty berets and bougainvillea pouffes of sleeves. They swished and stomped the runway to crescendoing zapateado dancing and castanet clacks that, around the three-minute-mark, intuitively clap along with rampant bhangra dhol drums and cries, matched on the beat with the appearance of method-acting models in dresses that expressed an ingenious harmony between the dramatic frou-frou of flamenco dress with the zenith of Mughal opulence.
To save you further indulgent descriptions – and to give yourself a true gift – just head to YouTube and watch the full thing. Here’s a quick run-through of how its soundscape progresses: ’90s dance-pop synths, Sean Paul’s Get Busy, tango à la Uruguayan musician Matos Rodriguez, Beyoncé’s Naughty Girl, the can-can… As someone who considers themselves a keen amateur admirer of show soundtracks, this collaboration between John Galliano and fellow former Blitz Kid Jeremy Healy (who have worked together often) stands out as one of the most rollicking, deliciously whiplashing I’ve ever seen online. Its power lay is not only in its status as a masterful example of music mixing in its own right, but in how it went beyond the task of using sound as a mood-boarding device – to just conjure a vibe. Sound acts as an aural foil to each look; a hallucinogenic evocation of a character, their walk and the texture of the cloth they wear in a way that feels even more direct, powerful and dramatic than is typical on a screen or stage.
More than accentuating a show’s impact, there are many moments in fashion history where music has arguably been the deciding factor in lifting a show beyond fashion’s remit and into the wider cultural canon. One of the most broadly cited examples is, of course, Gianni Versace’s AW91 show, which concluded with Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington strutting the runway, sisters in arms, lip-syncing to George Michael’s Freedom! ’90 – as they’d recently done in the song’s MTV phenomenon of a music video. Not only did it figure as part of a sequence of moments that helped to usher in the era of ‘the supers’ both within and beyond fashion, it also helped to establish Versace as a pop-cultural éminence, prefiguring the fashion-designer-as-super-celebrity era that unravelled in his wake.
Years later, Lee Alexander McQueen and John Gosling’s decision to use the occasion of the former’s SS10 show, Plato’s Atlantis – incidentally, the world’s first livestreamed show – as the forum for the world debut of Gaga’s Bad Romance as its finale track will forever be remembered as a pivotal moment in the braiding of the worlds of fashion, entertainment and technology.
Elsewhere, Frédéric Sanchez’s inclusion of Britney Spears’s Work Bitch in the soundtrack to Prada’s SS14 show arguably played a key role in highlighting the brand’s intrinsic hi-lo sensibility and pop appeal to both fashion and a then-increasingly mainstream audience. Perhaps less renowned, but no less significant in the eyes of both Eli Osheyack and me, is Tim Dewitt, Total Freedom (fka Bobby Beethoven) and Juliana Huxtable’s soundscape for Hood By Air’s AW14 show.
A brooding assemblage of a siren’s chants, snarling dogs and tripped-out Beyoncé samples, it culminated in a troupe of voguers storming the runway to Sugur Shane’s ballroom anthem Buddah vs Sugur, delivering a hairography performance that has me and YouTube commenter @juliannay2315 asking “just wanna kno what type of wig glue is y’all using”. More than just introducing ‘ha’ crashes and sassy ballroom MCing to New York’s frow, though, it marked a seminal moment in the industry’s relationship with the QTPOC (queer and trans people of colour) cultural underground in the global north. How? Well, it marked a crucial juncture between New York’s contemporary ballroom scene – of which HBA-affiliated party GHE2OG0TH1K was a standout protagonist – and the fashion mainstream, and proffered necessary conversations around the industry institution’s regressive-to-non-existent dialogue with communities beyond its socially exclusionary norms. And on a separate note, its finale in particular is partly the reason why any fashion girlie worth their salt these days knows that being deemed ‘cunt’ (note the lack of indefinite article!) is an enviable compliment, rather than a mark of attempted character assassination.
Indeed, despite their varying premises and intentions, a through-line that draws together a number of the examples I’ve cited is the importance of how they come to a close. That warrants underscoring, as Benji neatly does: “What makes a great finale track isn’t just a matter of technicality – it’s also what are you choosing to leave people with as they get up and run off to the next show, or talk to their neighbour about what they think.”
As for what I want to leave for you to chew on, here’s an account of a show finale that continues to haunt me in the most magical, spectral sense of the word. AW22: a season coloured by tension and discomfort for the axis-shifting geopolitical circumstances that unfolded during it. While collections were being unveiled as standard in Milan, the Russian army had crossed the Ukrainian border, starting its ongoing ground invasion of the sovereign nation. The ensuing climate at the shows was among the most surreal I’ve ever experienced – appraising the show season’s double-faced cashmere coat selection while also being an indirect spectator of Ukrainian industry colleagues wrapping their heads around news of fighter jets soaring over their home cities in real time was darkly relativising to say the least.
There was no direct address of these circumstances from any major industry players until towards the end of Paris, when invitees entered a transformed convention centre near Le Bourget airport for Balenciaga’s 360° show, discovering oversized T-shirts in the dual-tone hues of the Ukrainian flag on their seats. The set, essentially constructed as a giant snow globe, had the audience sat around its perimeter, making it an in-the-round stage. It was conceived by Sub, the Berlin architecture and spatial design firm behind Demna’s many meta-theatrical stagings at the helm of the house, long before the war’s outbreak. It was, in fact, intended as a commentary on the looming threat of climate change, Demna told Vogue Runway’s Sarah Mower, and the looming threat of snow’s extinction. In the given context, more timely readings weren’t just inevitable, but impossible. And that’s in large part due to the sound.
Opening with the reading of a poem by Ukrainian poet Oleksandr Oles, models struggled through a snowstorm to a weepy classical fugue and a thunderous industrial number by BFRND, Balenciaga’s music director and Demna’s husband. It was the scene that played out to the closing track – Storm, also by BFRND – that lingers with me. A steel-fisted thudder that sits somewhere between industrial, hard trance and Rotterdam hardcore, it comprises a bomb-like bassline, a juddering human scream, stabbing synths and a piercing whistle of a top line, all elements that collide in sync at its close.
It was then that the show’s two final looks skirted the snow-filled space: a male model in a cargo-pocketed tracksuit and house muse Eliza Douglas in a bodycon ballgown with a train flickering in the wind, the colours of their looks combining to create an embodiment of the Ukrainian flag. As they struggled through this artificial blizzard under the sensorial hellfire of pulsing strobe lights and sonic assault, it was impossible not to feel a sobering chill within. Whether or not you agree with the notion of fashion shows as spaces for political statement-making, Demna posited one as a theatre not of dreams, but of life, evoking brutal human realities as they play out beyond agenda-caveated headlines. If it weren’t for that soundtrack, I don’t know if he would have been able to achieve that quite as successfully – and I certainly don’t believe I’d be thinking about that moment as often as I still do today.
Photography courtesy of Maison Margiela. Taken from 10 Men Issue 61 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here.
