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Style that rocks

We take our fashion cues from music, and two hot new artists herald a return to glam.
Too bad their new CDs don’t sound as good as Brandon Flowers and Amy Lee look.

By SHARON FINK
Published October 6, 2006

Music has always been as much about fashion as music.

Grunge. Punk. Mod. Madonna. Disco. Hip-hop. The British Invasion. Stevie Nicks, gypsy. David Bowie, the Thin White Duke. Wardrobe malfunction.

The clothes and the music are attached to each other by double-sided tape that has the stickiness Janet Jackson needed at that fateful Super Bowl.

Credit the attachment to the power of music. Only that kind of cultural flash point can turn flannel shirts, droopy pants and thrift-store Army jackets decorated with safety pins into trends that consume sizable segments of the world. And every time that happens, some people wonder why that nicely dressed Mr. Manilow can’t be a bigger hit with the kids.

Among those wondering — sartorially, if not musically — is Elton John, whose feathered and rhinestoned heyday made him more Liberace than Chanel, but whose fashion heart was in the right place.

More sedately (and nattily) dressed today, John has been grumping about the lack of glamor in music. Style has taken a dive recently, he has been quoted as saying. He’s right.

At least 95 percent of the musical guests on MTV’s Total Request Live wear jeans and a T-shirt. The droopy pants have left hip-hop, for the most part, but now rappers dress like dads at a neighborhood barbecue. Diddy’s hot girl group, Danity Kane, looks like it’s outfitted by Victoria’s Secret clearance catalogs.

There’s more: Outkast and the Black Eyed Peas have as their muse the top designer for Oz’s munchkins. Miss Jackson continues to patronize the Wardrobe Malfunction department — when she’s not front row at classically functional Bill Blass runway shows. Beyonce dresses either to pitch her new fashion line — we’ll call it Armani’s Poor Relation — or to get a part on a local cable sci-fi show.

And the interchangeable pop tart of the day is dressed by the interchangeable celebrity stylist of the day, who will dress her tart in a slight variation of whatever yesterday’s tart was wearing.

But there is hope.

It comes from the same fashionable people who this week delivered two of the most eagerly anticipated albums of the year. If those albums become the huge hits they’re expected to be (despite our critics’ reservations), killer style will be back in full force.

In one case, make that Killers style.

Since breaking out in 2004, the Killers, a foursome from Las Vegas whose new album is Sam’s Town, have made it clear that what they wear is as important as what they perform. With panache they mix Mod, Saturday Night Fever, ’80s New Wave, Sgt. Pepper, old-school country-western (bolo ties and vests in; cowboy hats out), even nerd chic (striped sweater vests and a guitar can be so swoon-inducing).

Lead singer Brandon Flowers is the most fashion-focused of the group. He is partial to smart jackets and ties, and he loves Dior. (The design house gave him a pink jacket that became a favorite of his; he wore it for a performance last year with a black shirt and skinny pink tie.) He also understands how the most seemingly mundane choice can help create a fashion legacy: He once told the Times of London that he wore Hush Puppies to his first meeting with bandmate Dave Keuning  just because Brit-poppers Oasis wore them.

Elton John, a part-time Vegas showman himself these days (at the  Colosseum at Caesars  Palace), loves the Killers. He thinks they’re music’s next great fashion hope. In particular, he says, “you’re always interested to see what Brandon Flowers is wearing. He’s a bit of a fashion icon, and everything looks good on him. He just oozes star quality.”

Amy Lee, whose Evanescence has released The Open Door, does much more than ooze her style. She takes the Nu-Goth-Nu-Metal-Victorian trend that has been around for the past year, sucks it into her Cat 5 hurricane soundscape of pain, anger and something just short of optimism, and spits it back at the world as a sort of Morticia Addams meets Victorian prostitute.

Somehow, it works.

Lee has said she likes painting and designing her own clothes because she likes one-of-a-kind things. That sensibility — also applied to pieces she gets from other sources — sets her outfits apart from what is seen on runways and magazines.

“I just don’t like repeating myself,” she told the Associated Press.

Call it Nu Glamor. Elton would.

Sharon Fink can be reached at (727) 893-8525 or fink@sptimes.com.

[Last modified October 6, 2006, 17:48:31]