Let's begin with the comments section. The Kooks released a music video. It was shot in Australia on Bondi Beach in the kind of light that makes everything look like magic, shot on super 8 by the incredible uncyphil. There's a girl in it, alongside my husband. She's beautiful. She's wearing a banging bikini. And the internet, bless it, as always, had thoughts.
The comments came in with the particular energy of people who believe they are being helpful. Are you okay with this? How do you feel about your husband being in a music video with a girl in a bikini? And I read them and I felt profound amusement. Because the bikini in the video? The one this beautiful girl was wearing?
I designed it.
There is something almost poetic about it to me. The band, my husband Luke's band, The Kooks, have been making music that sounds like the best possible version of a British summer since forever, and now the fact I have a bikini brand it means both our careers are built around creating summer memories.
But the deeper thing, the thing that actually fascinates me beyond the delicious irony of the comments is how natural this overlap feels. Music and fashion have always been in conversation. They have always needed each other. They have always, when they found the right partners, produced something neither could have achieved alone.
On Vivienne Westwood and the Sex Pistols and What We Learned From Them
The most instructive fashion-music collaboration. Westwood and Malcolm McLaren didn't just put a band in some interesting clothes. They built an entire aesthetic universe in which the music and the fashion were inseparable, each one radicalising the other, each one impossible to fully understand without the other. Punk as a sound needs punk as a silhouette.
Music and fashion are both trying to do the same thing: make you feel something specific, in your body, immediately. When they speak to each other, the conversation is always interesting.
The thing I keep coming back to is how unsurprising it feels, from the inside. Of course the music and the swimwear ended up in the same conversation. When you live with someone's creative sensibility every day with samples on the breakfast table and demos playing from the next room. You can't keep it out. And why would you want to?
Shop our Collaboration "Sunny Baby" a baby blue and yellow bikini that shimmers in the sunshine. Available on our site.