Fashion Lyrics

Fashion and music constantly inspire each other: musicians wear clothing — usually — and build stage identities from it, while designers borrow music's energy and imagery in return. Fashion lyrics are what happens when songwriters make that relationship the subject itself — songs whose words are about fashion, designers, dressing up and the catwalk life.

Songs That Sing About Fashion

The best-known modern example is Fashion! by Lady Gaga, a dance track built around the catwalk: looking good and feeling fine, stepping into the room like a catwalk, designer dresses, diamonds and pearls, and a passage sung in French about haute couture and Christian Louboutin. The song was written by Pierre David Guetta, William James Adams, Paul Blair, Stefani Germanotta and Giorgio Tuinfort, and it treats fashion as pure transformation — taking a look off, putting another on, and feeling alive in the change.

Stage performers show the same bond in reverse. Groups such as Kiss built their identity on costume, while Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks became famous partly for a stage wardrobe that changed through a concert. Musicians are known as trendsetters and fashion followers at once, which is why songs about fashion keep being written in every era of pop.

A Short Playlist of Fashion Songs

The catalogue spans decades. Dedicated Follower of Fashion by The Kinks (1966) satirises the fashion-chasing young man of swinging London. Fashion Beats by the Black Eyed Peas (2010) and Fashion Killa by A$AP Rocky (2013) bring the designer-name era into hip-hop and pop, while Freakum Dress by Beyoncé (2006) makes a dress itself the instrument of confidence. In My Fashion by Gordon Lightfoot (1982) takes the quieter folk route, and Fashion Is My Kryptonite by Bella Thorne (2012) aims the theme at a younger audience.

The list continues with Fashion Zombies by The Aquabats (2005) — readers who enjoy the zombie side can continue to the fashion zombies summary linked from this page. Video links for several of these songs are collected in the references below, and the Lady Gaga celebrity page covers the artist behind the best-known fashion anthem of the set.

Fashion Words Inside the Songs

Fashion lyrics reward close listening because the fashion vocabulary does specific work in them. Brand names act as shorthand for status and taste, catwalk language turns confidence into choreography, and the act of dressing — zipping up, transforming, stepping into the room — stands in for becoming someone new. That is why the same handful of fashion situations recur across six decades of songs, from the Kinks' dandy to Gaga's couture: the songs are rarely really about garments. They are about identity, display and arrival, and fashion simply owns the most vivid vocabulary for all three.