How Your Music Taste Informs Your Personal Fashion Sense

As we speak, across the country, thousands of people are already preparing their outfits for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. Given that the Australian show is still ages away (even Christmas is before these shows!), it's safe to say that along with ticket sales and album releases, Swifties take their concert wardrobe very seriously.

As we speak, across the country, thousands of people are already preparing their outfits for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. Given that the Australian show is still ages away (even Christmas is before these shows!), it's safe to say that along with ticket sales and album releases, Swifties take their concert wardrobe very seriously.

But they're far from the only ones — and it's not just for concerts. Every single day, we all make choices about what we're going to wear and how we want to express our personal style through our fashion choices. But how much does our music taste actually impact our wardrobe, and how important is it for our clothes to complement our music taste, and vice versa?

Music and fashion have always had strong cultural ties, as well as having strongly influenced and informed each other over the years. As both are two of the most common forms of self-expression, it makes sense that they can mutually complement each other so much.

Whether they say something about our artistic preferences, our culture, our politics, our sexuality…clothes and music simply go hand and hand. And now more than ever, popular musicians and musical artists are synonymous with style icons, and we often correlate music styles with fashion styles whether we mean to or not. 

Truthfully, dressing in alignment with our music tastes is a bit performative, and so is specifically listening to music that coincides with your wardrobe. There have been plenty of times when I've felt strange or discordant listening to some of my favourite rap or drill artists while wearing a floral dress, or intentionally picking a particular kind of music that I feel specifically matches whatever I'm wearing that day.

When you take a step back and look at it, it seems to be a matter of confidence, as well as of belonging. Most genres of music will have an almost predetermined fashion style to go along with it, and dressing in accordance with these feels like an affirmation of belonging to that particular music scene and to certain groups of people. In this way, both fashion and music are two subcultures that are intrinsically intertwined.

Both our wardrobe and our playlists also tend to say a lot about who we are, so it makes sense that we want others to be able to look at our clothes or hear the music we're listening to and be able to understand us. At the same time, it's also about a sense of internal harmony, and feeling as though we're dressing in a way that's congruent with our other tastes — something that makes us feel like our tastes truly and wholly signal our identity.

But in an era that values extremely unique personal style, pushing boundaries and bringing eclectic styles together to create something new, going against the grain of "music meets fashion" is becoming more common. I personally think it’s a good thing, and TikTok seems to agree with me with the "normalise not looking like your music taste" trend!

But they're far from the only ones — and it's not just for concerts. Every single day, we all make choices about what we're going to wear and how we want to express our personal style through our fashion choices. But how much does our music taste actually impact our wardrobe, and how important is it for our clothes to complement our music taste, and vice versa?

Music and fashion have always had strong cultural ties, as well as having strongly influenced and informed each other over the years. As both are two of the most common forms of self-expression, it makes sense that they can mutually complement each other so much.

Whether they say something about our artistic preferences, our culture, our politics, our sexuality…clothes and music simply go hand and hand. And now more than ever, popular musicians and musical artists are synonymous with style icons, and we often correlate music styles with fashion styles whether we mean to or not. 

Truthfully, dressing in alignment with our music tastes is a bit performative, and so is specifically listening to music that coincides with your wardrobe. There have been plenty of times when I've felt strange or discordant listening to some of my favourite rap or drill artists while wearing a floral dress, or intentionally picking a particular kind of music that I feel specifically matches whatever I'm wearing that day.

When you take a step back and look at it, it seems to be a matter of confidence, as well as of belonging. Most genres of music will have an almost predetermined fashion style to go along with it, and dressing in accordance with these feels like an affirmation of belonging to that particular music scene and to certain groups of people. In this way, both fashion and music are two subcultures that are intrinsically intertwined.

Both our wardrobe and our playlists also tend to say a lot about who we are, so it makes sense that we want others to be able to look at our clothes or hear the music we're listening to and be able to understand us. At the same time, it's also about a sense of internal harmony, and feeling as though we're dressing in a way that's congruent with our other tastes — something that makes us feel like our tastes truly and wholly signal our identity.

But in an era that values unique personal style, pushing boundaries and bringing eclectic styles together to create something new, going against the grain of "music meets fashion" is becoming more common. I think it’s a good thing, and TikTok seems to agree, as evident in the "normalise not looking like your music taste" trend.

The trend shows that we can honour and enjoy a multiplicity of tastes and interests. By giving ourselves permission to dress however we want and listen to whatever we want, at the same time, we’re actively demonstrating that one size doesn’t fit all and we're actually allowed to enjoy contrasting styles.

So maybe it’s okay to be into heavy metal and love to wear dresses, or wear streetwear while listening to classical music, without feeling excluded by any of the groups we love. We’re complicated girlies with big wardrobes and plenty of playlists — and we love it.