There is latex couture, urban streetwear, high-end celebrity designers, cosplay…in a word, ‘fashion.’ Then there is the song “Fashion,” written, sung, and performed by David Bowie. A wildly inventive piece of music released in 1980, with an equally inventive video (see here), “Fashion” was pretty much the kind of sound and visual we came to expect from Mr. Bowie.
Celebrating David Bowie for what would have been his 74th birthday, Trent Reznor, of NIN fame (a rabid Bowie fan), participated with a bunch of other notables in the “A David Bowie Celebration: Just For One Day!” A clip from that show of Reznor, Atticus Ross, the Bowie alumni band (Mike Garson, Carlos Alomar, Gery Leonard, Mark Plati, Sterling Campbell and Catherine Russell) and Reznor’s wife Maandig Reznor recreating Bowie’s song “Fashion,” was ‘dropped’ at the beginning of this week.
As we did with Bowie, we expect the unusual, the darkly-tinged, the always inventive from Reznor. In this clip, he does not disappoint. Surely a product of the unfortunate ‘fashion’ of our present times, Reznor’s redo is a socially distanced clip, but it really puts all new normal musical attempts of this past year to shame. A multi-screen homage featuring the players appearing at times across spitting and stuttering black and white TVs, Reznor manages to as much “go retro” as make a statement on our times. Claustrophobic, industrial, with just enough original musical choices, “Fashion” is updated perfectly.
The icing on the cake here is that when viewing this clip from its YouTube page, Rolling Live Studios asks viewers to donate to the Save the Children organization. Rolling Live is the virtual events production company that produced the three-hour David Bowie birthday celebration. That show featured NIN as well as Duran Duran, Peter Frampton (who had grown-up with Bowie), Boy George and a host of others.
Fashion might be cyclic, but it also can truly rock!
