Really, it’s a very simple fashion philosophy.
#Album or cover kate bush hounds of love full
Designers love to throw around vague statements about creativity, but in someone like Kate Bush you see the full force of an active, searching mind – and an understanding of what the dressing up box can do. It’s not just their ethereality or eccentricity, but the stories they tell. That’s why her fashion choices are so memorable too. But there’s also an implicit suggestion about the galloping power of the imagination, particularly when combined with an outsider-ish sensibility that leaves you dreaming about literary ghosts or the merits of the mathematical symbol Pi. Yes, there’s that fantastic willingness to be intelligent and daring and strange. Yes, there’s the emotional precision of her lyrics and the expansive reach of her sounds. It’s one of the reasons why she’s so beloved. There is a narrative that exists in the fashion world – that of the slightly awkward kid who spends their adolescence sketching in their room and grows up to create clothing that fulfils their hunger for beauty and fantasy. The latter recently described his first encounter with her work aged 13 to AnOther, saying “I was spending a lot of time alone in my bedroom, working, and I started listening to her over and over… I love that she can find music in anything – from mother-and-son love, to pigeons and snowflakes.” Designers including Kim Jones, Phoebe Philo, Clare Waight Keller, Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Luella Bartley, and Craig Green have lined up to declare their love for the grand witch-queen of pop. This exhilarating malleability has made the singer a firm favourite in the fashion world. In her promotional images you can find her dressed as both a bat and a lion. Often, her vision has extended beyond the merely human. It allows the wearer to play role after role. For Bush, clothing is both kinetic and character-forming. There it’s all about the scarlet ballet slippers, used to reference Powell & Pressberger’s 1948 film of the same name – itself nodding to Hans Christian Andersen’s gruesome tale of a girl cursed to dance forever. To some degree, it’s hard to write about Kate Bush’s ‘style’, because so much of it exists in service to her music.
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For “Running Up That Hill” she opted for grey leotards and hakama – draped Japanese trousers – ideal for the video’s soft purple light as she and fellow dancer Michael Hervieu (dressed identically) grappled together in a series of motions that rolled between intimacy and distance. įorever a shapeshifter, across the course of the album’s music videos and shoots Bush fashioned herself into a small boy complete with knitted jerkin for “Cloudbusting”, an overcoat-clad dancer for “Hounds of Love”, and an Ophelia-style figure in a life jacket framed by flowers for the album’s B-side telling the story of a slowly drowning woman. Bush then stormed back onto the charts in 1985 with Hounds of Love. The latter, which marked her most experimental work to date, received lukewarm reception but has since been recognised as a classic. The Kick Inside and Lionheart were both released in 1978, Never Forever came in 1980 (featuring a brilliant futuristic look complete with chainmail bikini for “Babooshka”), and The Dreaming in 1982. A series of photos of her taken in the late ‘70s by Claude Vanheye see her in various jewel-coloured Fong Leng pieces, with one ritzy yellow number worn to walk a leashed crocodile.ĭuring those early years, Bush was prodigious. She wasn’t afraid of high fashion drama either. Her style suggested not only hippyish ease but a particularly English kind of eclecticism: all thin fabrics and big woolly socks. Often, this is the Kate Bush we still imagine, all big hair and ethereal seventies regalia.Īway from her videos, Bush was frequently pictured wearing rustic knits, silk blouses, waistcoats, colourful tights, thigh high-boots, and a further succession of diaphanous dresses. Two separate music videos released to accompany the Emily Brontë-inspired track featured Bush fluttering around a field and a stage in flowing gowns: one red, one white.
The lead single “Wuthering Heights” remains one of her best known to this day, its high-pitched, broken-hearted register still a favourite among brave karaoke-goers. Bush burst into the limelight in 1978 with her debut album The Kick Inside.