The Soundtrack Of Style: Music’s Role On The Runway

While everyone else was focused on the clothes, stylist Dione Davis almost gave up wearing color because of a runway’s soundtrack. She styled Deveaux’s last show, which had “an old-school runway DJ who was excellent, but the collection didn’t match the music. It should have been 90s neutrals but it was these crazy prints and colorful suits. It put me off color so badly that I haven’t worn much since—I’m only able to say that because I styled it.”

With every passing year, incongruence between the music and the other elements of a fashion show becomes more insufficient. A boppy house track used to be the standard background for fashion shows, back when they weren’t filmed to be chopped and screwed by the internet and there was less potential for the ultimate marketing ploy: every beat of a show has a distinct identity, a unique tableaux set to a particular soundscape. Each has the potential to be packaged as a gestalt and sold as a fleshed-out moment to people craving not just a look but an existence, a ready-made life that’s easy to slot oneself into.