In 1987, Comme des Garçons gave Japanese musician and recording engineer Seigen Ono two instructions: make music no one had heard before, and make the clothes look beautiful. One sounds considerably easier than the other. Ono brought together musicians from New York’s downtown experimental scene, including Arto Lindsay, Bill Frisell and John Zorn, recording across New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo. The resulting instrumentals moved between jazz, rhythmic experimentation and atmospheric textures, never quite settling into a single temperament. Released across albums in 1988 and 1989, the recordings were reissued in 2019 alongside previously unreleased material.
The revealing detail is what Ono was not given. He had never seen a Comme des Garçons show, and the clothes were kept from view while he worked. No collection to imitate, no moodboard to translate into sound, no house playlist to dictate what Comme des Garçons was supposed to sound like. There was a brief, and the freedom to make something strange with it.
Fashion has a long history of mistaking proximity for understanding. Get the right musician into the room, borrow the right references, find a sound that suggests you have been paying attention, and suddenly a collection acquires cultural depth. Or at least the surface of it. I am not immune to the trick, either. Put a leather jacket against swelling strings, and it becomes wistful, romantic, perhaps a little tragic. Set it to an abrasive Death Grips track, and the same jacket becomes a threat. The garment has not changed. The soundtrack has changed the person we imagine wearing it. It is a neat bit of psychological theatre, and a remarkably cheap way to make a collection seem to know more than it does.
For Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Men Spring/Summer 27 show, Fred again.. created a bespoke 17-minute mix moving between club music, experimental electronics, and rap, with contributions from artists including KETTAMA, Mabe Fratti and Young Thug. Dior’s show notes drew a parallel between sampling and remixing in music and Anderson’s habit of taking familiar codes apart and putting them back together. The tuxedo came in a looser fit; houndstooth was printed rather than woven. The analogy is neat, perhaps too neat, but the mix itself is less orderly. It opens with “Summer Never Dies” before cutting, pausing, and handing over to unexpected successors rather than settling into a seamless runway groove. The joins remain audible. Rather than smoothing over the contradictions, the soundtrack leaves them on display.
There is a difference between music that makes a show feel current and music that gives it another dimension. Sometimes, though, the musician does not merely interpret the clothes. They become the spectacle.
SOPHIE’s appearance at Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer “20 show deserves more than a name-check. At the Louvre, a vast screen carried an extended version of “It’s Okay to Cry”, SOPHIE’s face suspended against a shifting sky above a small door through which the models emerged. Created especially for the show in collaboration with Woodkid, the visuals made her work the presentation’s focal point. SOPHIE herself watched from the audience. The song had already marked a turning point: its 2017 video was her first on-camera appearance, putting her face and voice at the centre of her work in a new way.
I have a bias here: SOPHIE is one of the most revolutionary artists I have ever listened to. On OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES, sound seemed to acquire a body. Synthetic textures scraped against the ear, glistened with artificial gloss, or turned startlingly tender. She made artifice feel more alive than nature itself, treating pop less as a fixed genre than a substance to stretch, melt, and rupture. The album could be cerebral and bodily at once, its pleasures abrasive one moment, almost unbearably intimate the next. Listening to it, I have never been particularly interested in the argument that synthetic things are somehow less real. SOPHIE understood that artifice could be its own kind of truth. At Louis Vuitton, a song about vulnerability and self-acceptance became the centrepiece of a vast luxury spectacle.
The house benefited from the association, of course. But SOPHIE was not anonymous playlist garnish. Her work was the event. Louis Vuitton gained access to an artist’s world, while her music reached an audience that might not otherwise have encountered it. The exchange was real, but it did not reduce soPhie to a luxury nouse’s cultural accessory. Her work did not need Louis Vuitton to conter value on it. Ine snow gave that value another stage.
The balance shifts when a house invites in artists whose cultural currency it can claim to share.
At Demna’s first Gucci runway show, staged in February for Fall/ Winter ’26, Internet rap boys Fakemink and Nettspend joined a cast of supermodels and internet personalities. London’s Saviour himself paused midway down the runway to retrieve his phone from a Gucci-branded bum bag, checked it, and carried on. It was a silly little moment.
But the casting was about more than virality. Mink and Nett belong to an online rap culture where music, archival fashion, and personal style are already tangled together. Their cultural fluency developed outside the traditional tashion establishment. Gucci gains a ready-made connection to their audience; the artists gain exposure to the reach and machinery of a global luxury house. How much either side gains is harder to judge from one runway appearance. What is clear is that Gucci controls the snow and much of the imagery through which the moment reaches the public.
Fashion has always wanted the underground, provided the underground can be made useful. It likes the danger, the novelty, the delicious little thrill of discovering something before everyone else. It wants the feeling of being in on something, preferably before the rest of the room catches up. The trouble starts when the music is desirable but the people and histories behind it become optional. A house can recognise a scene without understanding it, then profit from the confusion.
Hood By Air’s Fall/Winter ’14 show offers a more complicated case. Its soundtrack moved through siren-like chants, snarling dogs, and tripped-out Beyoncé samples, all before culminating in a troupe of voguers storming the runway to Sugur Shane’s ballroom anthem “Buddah vs Sugur”. The finale brought New York’s ballroom scene into contact with the fashion mainstream.
Ballroom did not need a luxury runway to certify its importance. Shaped and sustained by queer and trans people of colour, its codes, performers. and histories existed long before fashion made room tor them. But HBA was not borrowing from a safe distance. Shayne Oliver’s work was already entangled with New York’s queer club scene. That matters, though it does not settle the question of credit. A relationship with a culture is not the same thing as owning its story.
What happens after a culture becomes visible? Whose names survive beyond the show report? Who gets commissioned again, and who is invited back? A runway can amplify a scene without redistributing the power to represent it. Cultural credit is not a thank-you note buried in the show notes. The people who built the language should remain visible, and benefit, when it travels.
Gucci casting underground rappers and HBA bringing its own club-world connections onto the runway are not interchangeable encounters. The former gives a luxury house a route into an online rap scene; the latter emerged from an existing relationship with the culture it presented. Flattening both into a single story about fashion borrowing from the underground would miss the distinctions that matter: who made the relationship, who controls the frame, and what survives after the show.
Online, cultural knowledge has its own systems of recognition, some of them gloriously unserious. Take the “ballhog” aesthetic, the irreverent, archive-heavy TikTok look built around deceptively ordinary outfits and obscure, often expensive designer pieces. The clothes can look unremarkable to the untrained eye. The wearer knows, as well as the individual who recognises the pieces. As rapper Protect’s recurring producer tag goes, “If you not Ballhog, then die.”
The whole thing feels like an inside joke for people who are thoroughly IG reel-pilled, and I refuse to believe everyone involved is taking it entirely seriously. But that is partly why it works: it turns deep-cut references into a game of recognition. The outfit is a password. The appeal is not necessarily to look rich, but to know something the person standing beside you might not. Luxury has its own version of this game, only with better lighting and considerably more expensive invitations.
The ballhog aesthetic treats references as social currency. The Hellp shows the other side of the bargain: what happens when an artist’s carefully built world gets reduced to a look everyone else can recognise.
The sardonic, Hedi-wearing Los Angeles electroclash duo still resists being filed under “indie sleaze”. In an interview, they described the contemporary formula for recognition as “Fashion Week appearance + chorus gaining traction on TikTok = celebrity.” Their objection is not to image itself; The Hellp’s own project depends on it. It is to the idea that one recognisable aesthetic should be enough to explain an evolving musical project. The look gets people through the door, then threatens to become the entire story.
Charli XX’s Music, Fashion, Film (2026) makes the tension more self-aware. Fashion is no longer simply the world music wants access to; it becomes music’s subject. The album cover features John Cale, Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese, three figures associated with the title’s respective worlds. In the video for “SS26”, fashion week becomes a performance in its own right, complete with fittings, backstage Roitfeld and Anthony Vaccarello. The industry’s rituals become both ridiculous it looks.
Charli does not need to stand outside of fashion to make fun of it. She knows the references, wears the clothes, and belongs to the machinery she observes. The irony does not cancel out the transaction; it makes the transaction visible. A critique of the system can still be a product within it. In fashion, even the call-out can become part of the campaign.
Recognising the right references and knowing what to do with them are two different skills. A strong soundtrack rarely has to announce its intelligence; the choices give the game away. Michel Gaubert, the French sound designer who has spent decades shaping music for fashion shows, has made a career of that distinction.
His career began in record shops and the Paris nightlife circuit before he started working with Karl Lagerfeld in 1989. When Lagerfeld asked him to create a soundtrack inspired by Malcolm McLaren’s “House of the Blue Danube”, Gaubert chose not to reproduce the reference. Instead, he mixed De La Soul with Luciano Pavarotti, Jesse Norman and Neneh Cherry, bringing together sounds that might look improbable on paper but made sense within Lagerfeld’s creative world.
Gaubert’s value is not simply that he has a formidable record collection. It is that he knows what to do with it. He makes choices, draws connections, and decides when a familiar reference needs to be pushed somewhere unexpected. A deep archive is one thing; knowing which tracks should meet, collide, or be kept apart is another. Cultural fluency is not a collection of credentials, and good taste is not a Spotify queue with a luxury budget. It requires judgment.
A commission can begin as background music and end up somewhere else entirely. Consider Haruomi Hosono’s Watering a Flower. In 1984, he composed the work for MUJI, its quiet, slightly disorienting electronics intended for the shop floor. His track “Talking” later found another audience when Vampire Weekend sampled it for “2021”. The connection led to a split release pairing the two songs. Hosono reportedly found it surprising that anyone remained interested in the older work, which he had considered simply a job. There is something rather lovely about that: music made to accompany shopping found an audience with no reason to be shopping at all.
No one needs to pretend every branded playlist is a lost masterpiece. Hosono offers a more useful test than whether the music sounds fashionable at the moment of release. Can it lead somewhere beyond the association? Can it outlive the job it was hired to do? Or does the whole thing stop being interesting the second the logo disappears?
Which brings us back to Ono. Comme des Garçons gave him a brief without showing him the clothes. He was not asked to reproduce the house’s identity in sound; he was trusted to make something the house could not have made by itself. The distinction is not between commercial music and art, but between commissioning an artist’s perspective and using it as decoration.
Fashion can pay for a track, cast the right rapper, and put a DJ’s name in the credits. It can borrow a scene’s vocabulary and wear its cultural credibility for a season. What it cannot purchase is the history that made the sound matter in the first place, or guarantee that its own association will mean anything once the collection is over and done with. If the only thing giving the music value is the logo beside it, the house has no created cultural value. It has paid to stand next to it.
Illustrations Manasi Nair
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