Remixes & Street Style: The Future of Fashion & Music

It isn’t so often you come across the fashion world colliding with one of the most critically acclaimed musicians of our generation, and that is exactly what happened this past Friday at the UNDERCOVER Autumn/Winter 2021 fashion show.

UNDERCOVER is the brainchild of Japanese fashion designer Jun Takahashi, with his pieces blending Japanese streetwear with punk rock influences. Takahashi started UNDERCOVER in the early nineties while studying fashion in Tokyo and became heavily influenced by punk rock legends, The Sex Pistols. With this constant influence of rock and punk culture, Takahashi brought in Thom Yorke, the infamous lead singer of Radiohead to score his latest runway show.

For the UNDERCOVER Fall 2021 runway show, dubbed “Creep Very”, Yorke produced a slowed down version of Radiohead’s “Creep” and included a mixture of low and high pitch sounds to further throw off both the listener and viewer. This reinvented version of “Creep” comes in at around the 7:30 minute mark and covers the full womenswear section of the collection, dragging the previously four-minute song into a painfully-slow-ten-minute rendition. Thom Yorke turned this beloved Radiohead track into an even more eerie, haunting song. Watching Takahashi’s off-beat pieces walk along to off-beat music delivers a multi-sensory experience that is just—well—creepy.

In that sense, I think Takahashi and Yorke’s intended purpose to unnerve was executed beautifully.

Perhaps the success of this remix comes from the fact that this is not Thom Yorke’s first attempt at scoring a fashion show. Yorke himself has remixed and tracked multiple Rag & Bone shows, with his first feature dating all the way back to 2012. His work is present on soundtracks from Films, The Twilight Saga: New Moon and Motherless Brooklyn.

By slowing down Creep, Thom Yorke makes us question how much of this remixed influence stems from TikTok. It is no secret that TikTok has become responsible for the revival of remixes, and many of these remixes are centered around the slowing down of vocals. Yorke did exactly this as well, while also adding in elements from his own musical toolbox such as tempo and pitch. The slowed-down vocals of “Creep” create an almost confusing mixture of slightly off-beat sounds along with high and low-frequency pitches scattered throughout the ten-minute journey of a song.

While this eerie rendition of a nineties classic may not be considered a TikTok song, Thom Yorke’s reinterpretation of an old tune is maybe a peek into our future. Like Yorke, I would not be surprised if we started to see more established musicians include tracking fashion shows as a part of their job description. Hopefully, Thom Yorke and Jun Takahashi won’t be the last crossover you see between the music and fashion industry, and who knows—we may even see more crossovers between runway shows and live music one day—if we’re lucky.