Costume Ideas

I have researched into the outfits that artists within my chosen genre typically wear within their music videos. It is these kind of styles that will influence the costumes and styling that will appear within my own music video.





It seems that costume and styling within modern hip-hop music videos is fairly elaborate. I like the idea of having bright makeup that stands out around the eyes and will therefore use this idea on my own performers. I also like the idea of having neutral outfits in black or white, with a touch of colour in the form of an accessory, such as the shoes or coloured tights. I will therefore use this either in my video or within the images for my digipak.

Styling is important in order to portray the genre and individual images of particular artists. Their clothing and makeup needs to represent the type of music they are releasing and performing. For example, if a hip-hop artist were to dress in clothes normally associated with the rock/indie genres, such as all black clothing, then we would not link them with the hip-hop genre, even if their music clearly portrays all the conventions of the genre.

Styling is also used to create an individual persona to surround the artist. We often see these images change and develop over time, as their music grows and peoples tastes become more modernised. This also reflects how their music changes as their audiences begin to mature. A good example of this would be Rihanna. Her image has changed dramatically over time, as her music has become more edgy.



We can see that Rihanna began her career as a typical female artist with long flowing hair. She seems somewhat younger and more innocent within the first image seen above. Within the second photo, Rihanna's image has not changed drastically, although her styling seems to have become more prominant in that she seems to be wearing more makeup and has dyed her hair a darker shade of brown. The third image is more of a drastic stylistic change. Rihanna's long hair has been cut into a short choppy bob, and has been dyed black. We can see from other images that Rihanna's hair did become shorter than this, cut into a pixie style bob. More recently, Rihanna grew her hair and dyed it a bright shade of red and changed her clothing style back into feminine dresses. From here, however, she seems to have become more risque. Her music has become more edgy and sexual, as has her look. Rihanna has developed her old hair colour of plain brown again, however has changed her outfits to revealing shorts and dresses, with crop tops to show off her stomach.

We can tell by looking at artists that audiences project a performers image onto themselves. By looking at Rihanna, we are able to recognise that around the time in which Rihanna adopted the bright red hair colour, many fans and other artists also adopted the same style.
It is these small changes to styling, such as hair colour, that enable artists to change their images as a whole.