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.

At Collina Strada’s FW24 show this February, a clarion call rang out, reverberating off the walls of Rockefeller Center’s underbelly: “We are the women of Collina / Our strength reflected in Collina.” Half Rocky-esque pump-up anthem and half uncanny chorale in the vein of Holly Herndon’s work with AI, musician Oyinda’s latest contribution to the Collina canon accompanied this season’s models as they did laps up and down the runway, toting dumbbells made of (real?) gourds or showing off the gnarly sweat stains and cut abs designer Hillary Taymour embedded in the clothes.

This season, Taymour “wanted [the runway soundtrack] to feel very classical GIRL energy,” so she called upon Oyinda, who is responsible for several Collina songs, including last season’s sweeping orchestral “Soft is Hard,” saying she “wanted a large symphony to make it feel like a very serious fashion show—but in true Collina essence, it had emo punk elements, incorporating our take on the band TATU.” As model Kelly Mittendorf noted after walking for Collina, when soundtracking runway shows, “It's important to think about a cohesive ‘moment’ from an audience member’s perspective because they only see each model for a few seconds.”

A pause in the muscular music was interrupted by a distorted shriek: “I CARE A LOTTA.” This cheesy-but-earnest refrain (I care a lotta, I wear Collina Strada!) has been, much like the deadstock fabric Taymour uses religiously in her eco-minded designing, recycled since the pandemic forced shows to adapt to a digital format, some brands much more successfully than others. The Collina COVID M.O. was to take advantage of the medium, creating frenetic video collages and transforming models, Animorph-style, into creatures they resembled, all soundtracked by musician Angel Prost’s earworms.

Stuck at home during the first winter of the pandemic, many Collina fans couldn’t stop replaying the FW21 “Collina-mals” presentation, unable to get Prost’s chopped-and-screwed version of Lit’s unimpeachable pop-punk hit “My Own Worst Enemy” out of their heads.

With the right soundtrack, something simple but dynamic and catchy enough to sear memorable images into a viewer’s brain, a fashion show can sell its models’ poses, strides, and other mannerisms alongside the clothes themselves, ushering in a new era where trends transcend material possessions and extend to ways of being. If a brand can harness an entire attitude or vibe, the clothes nearly market themselves. Everything a potential buyer encounters in the world with a similar ethos, from other media to influential people, furthers the brand agenda without being connected to (or funded by) the brand at all.

Davis called out Margiela’s SS24 couture show as exceptional in terms of its soundtrack paired with the models’ mannerisms, gushing that “The lithe walk of the models was so so good.” On top of being visually compelling, the off-kilter theatricality of the surreal walks set to Lucky Love’s “Masculinity” created an energy that drew comparisons to everything from the video game Silent Hill to the work of David Lynch. This particular show inspired dozens of TikToks in which people stagger down city streets as if bound by the same corsets and glazed with the same Pat McGrath makeup as the Margiela models—completely free advertising, set to the tune of the runway soundtrack.

Ben Brunnemer, who this season created soundtracks for both Thom Browne’s FW24 and Lou Dallas’ first show back after a years-long hiatus, admits to “thinking about how fashion influences the music that [he] makes outside of that world" more than the other way around. Lou Dallas designer Raffaella Hanley gave Brunnemer “a ludicrously broad 'mood board' for the track—dancehall, ‘Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,’ Miley Cyrus, an opera track from The Fifth Element soundtrack, early dubstep, ambient, etc. When I heard the final soundtrackthat Ben created, it felt like telepathy.”

Brunnemer freaked the traditional runway house beat with soprano trills and electronic strings that sounded like the audio of a video game’s boss fight, lending the models atmospheric energy—each walk was transformed by the accompanying music into something with higher stakes than just displaying clothes, but the vibes were tempered by Miley Cyrus’ twangy crooning, keeping things from getting too cerebral or losing sight of the collection’s “court jester mall rat” sensibilities. Though it started at a point in the realm of traditional runway tracks, for a label re-entering the fashion show space after time away, Brunnemer’s mix provided a simple, accessible, but just-specific-enough background upon which each outfit, in turn, had its moment.

As capitalism continues to favor marketing runway moments, as opposed to a collection’s pieces themselves, we can expect to see the complete death of the generic house soundtrack in favor of music that will veer more and more toward world-building for the brand, even edging into jingle territory à la Collina Strada. Who will be the brave soul to try and rhyme “hella” with “Margiela” next season?