“I think we’re permanently in costume. I mean, where does it stop?” asks Dave Macklovitch, a.k.a. Dave 1, one half of electro-funk duo Chromeo, when asked if clothes can change an artist. “Is there ever a point where Karl Lagerfeld is wearing Adidas track pants with flip-flops? I don’t think so. Kanye’s diamond teeth are stuck on. They’re not fronts, they’re his teeth.”
Chromeo have always been passionate about their style, so it only makes sense that they recently unveiled their fall capsule collection with clothing designer Surface to Air. Consisting of four pieces — two by Macklovitch and two by Patrick Gemayel (P Thugg) — the collection consists of a leather biker jacket and pants, and a silk shirt and bomber jacket emblazoned with a leopard-head print.
“Heavily leathered items for Dave and heavily leoparded items for me,” explains Gemayel, currently wearing a custom-made paintball jersey for the Stoned Assassins team, his long beard braided and dyed orange.
The collection is the duo's first foray together into designing clothes (Macklovitch has also done a capsule collection with Frank & Oak), but even more than that, it represents a full-circle acknowledgment of their ongoing creative partnership with Surface to Air, the design firm behind every visual aspect of Chromeo, including stage shows, music videos and album art.
“We trust them with the whole visual language of Chromeo,” says Macklovitch, dressed in a leather biker jacket, plaid shirt and torn jeans. “Everything but clothes. I think they would even find that far-reaching.”
Some may think that this type of relationship, in which a creative director calls the shots when it comes to an artist’s image, is reserved only for the most vapid, hollowed-out pop star, but it’s actually part of a long-standing tradition that includes some of the most creative artists in modern music, including Pink Floyd, New Order, Daft Punk and Kanye West.
“We patented our relationship with what Pink Floyd did in the ’70s with Hipgnosis, an English design firm that is seminal for anyone into album artwork," says Macklovitch. "They are the very best ever and basically crafted all of Pink Floyd’s conceptual images, and we really liked the idea of a collaboration between a band and a design firm to create that story.”
Hipgnosis began in the late ‘60s, when Floyd approached their friends Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell to design the cover for their second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. That started a prosperous and influential career in which the pair of art school grads would continue to design for Floyd (including both the famous prism image and the flying pig over the Battersea Power Station), but also notable acts such as Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Paul McCartney, Genesis and the Who.
A decade after Hipgnosis began, Peter Saville began his role as director of Factory Records, which employed a creative team to work on the artwork for all their artists, including, most notably, Joy Division and New Order. Post-Factory, Saville would design for the likes of King Crimson, Roxy Music and Duran Duran, but it was his role with Factory that influenced so many labels and artists, big and small, to follow in their footsteps by either employing in-house creatives to manage everything visual, or at the very least, establish long-standing relationships with creative directors.
Kanye West constantly name drops his art director and “style advisor” Virgil Abloh, who, as the creative centre of West’s Donda imprint, is responsible for designing everything from albums covers, live shows and videos to limited-edition sneakers and T-shirts.
Even the Sex Pistols relied on the creative input from designer Malcolm McLaren, who not only managed the group and recruited Johnny Rotten, but with the help from girlfriend Vivienne Westwood (with whom he operated the London clothing boutique Sex), honed the band’s look. Punk rock, a genre of music built around the very idea of anti-establishment, was effectively initiated by a partnership between a band and a clothing boutique. And just as McLaren helped a band of working-class teens become punk rock icons, indie artists have also looked to creative partnerships in order to bring them to that next level.
“People are more and more aware of trying to create an image, so there is a lot of movement toward working with somebody who can keep their image moving in a cohesive direction,” says Justin Broadbent, a visual artist who has designed album covers and directed music videos for Canadian artists such as Metric, Serena Ryder, Yukon Blonde and Shad. He’s been working with Shad as an unofficial creative director since as early as 2007’s Fresh Prince-themed video for “The Old Prince Still Lives at Home” (which Broadbent directed), doing everything from designing his website, branding and album covers to directing videos and photoshoots.
“Someone like Shad, if he was to dress himself going onstage, it would just be a T-shirt, but that odd photo shoot where he gets a stylist, it brings him to the next level,” he says. “That kind of attention to detail in any aspect of the performer is important, and as much as we don’t want to admit it, your music is part of it, but so is your look.”
And as crucial as the role is in an artist’s development, creative partners often go without the glory.
“One of the things that sometimes bothers me is that you see these big-time music videos, like a Lady Gaga or a Lana Del Rey video, and it says music video by Lana Del Rey,” says Broadbent. “It's like, no it wasn't. She sings the song but there is a huge team of people that work on this. I think it's important that people recognize it's not just the artist making this magic.”
That makes it refreshing when a band like Chromeo goes out of their way to acknowledge their relationship with their creative partners for what it is — a collaboration between artists.
“When people think of Chromeo, the fist thing is like, oh, the legs, the female leg keyboard stands,” says Macklovitch. “That was all Surface to Air’s idea. We always said we wanted Chromeo to be an interdisciplinary thing, with music and visuals combined, and now clothes and even merchandising. We’re into the correlation between style and music and the way in which appearance can inform the way you experience music, and there are a lot of people involved with that."
Follow Jesse Kinos-Goodin on Twitter: @JesseKG