Fashion loves metal, and these crossovers are all the proof you need
In revealing their latest capsule collection—a collaboration with Rammstein, Germany’s favorite industrial pyromaniac sons—Paris-based fashion house Balenciaga reminded us this week of something that, had we looked a little closer and paid a little more attention, we should have already known. That revelation? Fashion loves metal. Read more: 10 fashion brands who found inspiration in […]
It might sound counterintuitive: Alternative music and its adjacent subcultures, particularly those at the fringes, have long rallied against the ideas and ideals of mainstream fashion, focusing misplaced vitriol on the very concepts of trends and lashing out against ideas of enforced normality.
And it’s an understandable mindset. To a lot of people, being alternative means being countercultural—being the outsider, being the weirdo. No doubt about it: It is jarring, as someone who grew up in the ’00s, to see fast fashion websites appropriating stylistic tropes from emo, goth, metal, nü metal and hardcore; it does force a double take to see teenagers now, in 2021, dressed like it’s 2006.
But the reality is a little more complicated. Subcultural fashion, after all, is still fashion. There are aesthetic tropes, trends and signifiers that a person is “alt” in the same way there are sartorial identifiers for a person who’s more traditionally “fashionable.” These things run parallel, not in opposite directions. There’s no reason that the streams shouldn’t cross.
In fact, they’ve been crossed for some time. And the Balenciaga x Rammstein collaboration is a great example of just how well these two things work together.
Something easy to forget about metal, but which Till Lindemann and co. have so clearly never lost sight of—with their flamethrowers and penchant for high production value—is that metal, as a genre, is theatrical by nature. It’s self-aware, OTT, even camp. A lot like, you guessed it, high fashion.
It’s a give-and-take relationship, too. While—somewhere between the studded wallets of Comme Des Garcons, VETEMENTS’ appropriation of black-metal fonts and flame graphics and Prada’s monstrous goth-indebted platform boots—the racks of a high fashion boutique could easily be mistaken for the shelves of a Hot Topic or indoor market alt stall at first glance. metal and extreme music has warmly embraced fashion in return.
In an even more prominent crossover, November 2020 saw American designer and high fashion’s own Prince of Darkness Rick Owens sharing an image of Ghostemane to his official Instagram, decked out in a selection of lavish red threads and a pair of metallic heels. Far from a jarring image—not so much as despite the more intense elements of Ghostemane’s music and personal style, but rather because of them—it made perfect sense as a collaboration. A partnership only further cemented when Ghostemane provided the soundtrack for Owens’ fall/winter 2021 runway show—a presentation fittingly titled GETHSEMANE.
Of course, the influence is sometimes a little less obvious: less about iconic figures from one artistic sphere bleeding into the other and more about a vibe, a feeling.
Seeing a brand such as Balenciaga working in tandem with a band such as Rammstein—a name so deeply etched in the annals of heavy music, with fans spanning multiple generations—is a wholly gratifying experience. A reminder that collaboration is king and real art respects real art. No matter what form it takes.