“When I think of Eddie Vedder, I think of a guy who wore cargo shorts and Doc Martens the whole career,” Mr. Lewis said. “Whereas Michael Jackson and David Bowie were these evolving characters. The change in direction sonically matched a change in the look.”
Mr. Lewis, 32, was wearing Doc Martens himself. But it turned out the black boots, which he wore with black shorts over black tights and a vintage Astro Boy T-shirt, were thrown on following an up-all-night party in the company of his girlfriend, the actor-singer-model Zoë Kravitz. His own rock fashion aspirations are aligned with the King of Pop and the Thin White Duke.
Or as he put it, “I’m very concerned with showmanship, presentation and using fashion as a vehicle to heighten the sonic experience.”
Mr. Lewis has an interest not just in stage clothes, but the whole crazy quilt he called “fashiontown.” He was a ubiquitous presence last summer at New York Fashion Week: Men’s, attending so many shows and parties that, as he admitted, “My brain was kind of hurting at the end.”
Last month, he took a break from touring to attend New York Fashion Week, catching the presentation of a designer he admired, Robert Geller, and doing a D.J. set at the Roxy Hotel in TriBeCa.
More than a casual observer, Mr. Lewis has also composed and sometimes performed the music for Public School’s runway shows; collaborated on a film with Michael Bastian, General Motors and Dazed Digital; modeled for a look book for the jewelry designer Nikolai Rose; modeled in a Levi’s campaign this year; and recently scored the soundtrack for a video to promote District Vision, a soon-to-start eyewear line.
Even without his own label, he’s giving Kanye West a run for his money as the music world’s leading fashion dilettante. “I like being on the outskirts of fashiontown,” Mr. Lewis said, in a voice mellow and whispery after his sleep-deprived night. “I like observing and I like being a part of it on a music level.”
Dao-Yi Chow, who along with Maxwell Osborne founded and designs the Public School label, said one of his favorite things about producing the runway shows is working with Mr. Lewis on the music. “We’ll tell him the mood or the attitude,” Mr. Chow said. “He does a great job of picking up on what we’re feeling. So much of what we do is inspired by music and live performance.”
The collaboration dates from the beginning of both Twin Shadow and the fashion label. Mr. Lewis wore a black leather motorcycle jacket in his early photo shoots and music videos, and had styled his hair into a pompadour. Mr. Chow and Mr. Osborne liked Twin Shadow’s moody ’80s-inflected synth pop and the visual imagery inspired their first collection.
“It was sort of like a greaser-slash-rocker look, but there was a bit of emotion to it,” said Mr. Chow, adding that the videos “had the same references we were speaking to.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story
When the Public School designers invited Mr. Lewis to their studio, he was taken aback to see magazine photos of himself tacked to their mood board. But a friendship developed, and Mr. Lewis became not just their muse but their music scorer. He has since modeled in Public School’s ad campaigns, too.
From the beginning of his career as Twin Shadow, Mr. Lewis has exhibited his own highly considered visual aesthetic, as well as playful references to fashion iconography. His first official video, for the anti-love song “Slow,” was a take on the banned Calvin Klein commercials from the ’90s, the ones where nubile-looking models stand in a wood-paneled room and submit to leading questions from a pervy off-camera interviewer.
Mr. Lewis plays the sexually exploited model, dressed in jeans, a denim vest and a tight white T-shirt, and the gay-or-straight ambiguity he gives off is reminiscent of early Prince. He came up with the concept, as he does for all his videos and album covers.
“I just really wanted the first image of me to be provocative and edgy,” Mr. Lewis said, recalling how the Calvin Klein ads made him feel weirdly uncomfortable as a kid. “I didn’t want it to be completely throwback, but I did want it to have some dirt to it. We were really in a dingy basement in Long Island. We were really filming on VHS cameras.”
Subsequent videos have shown Mr. Lewis acting out a two-part dystopian biker gang fantasy (he’s into motorcycles) and standing above Los Angeles in a ribbed muscle tee as the black-and-white images of him and the city evoke vintage Herb Ritts. The videos can be a bit melodramatic and campy in a way that fashion people respond to.
Max Vallot, a founder of District Vision, the eyewear line, said Mr. Lewis is different than other musicians he can think of in that “he’s very much at the center” of his visual presentation.
“There are a lot of artists who have cool covers and videos, but most of the time don’t have anything to do with it,” Mr. Vallot said.
Ms. Kravitz, in an email from Paris, wrote: “For George, music and style go hand in hand. When he has an idea musically, it seeps out into all other aspects of his art, clothes, artwork, the live show. It’s all connected.”
Mr. Lewis was born to a Jewish father and a Dominican mother, and raised in a backwater part of Florida. As a child, culture and fashion filtered down to him from his three sisters, he said. Two were modern dancers, while a third was into the theater.
“My sisters used to pretend to be in music videos: They would make up dances and I would be fake-filming them,” Mr. Lewis said. “They almost set the desire point of New York for me.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAdvertisementContinue reading the main story
He did move to New York, living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and scoring music for a dance company before creating Twin Shadow. After nine years, he left for Los Angeles, but his relationship with Ms. Kravitz and his work with Public School and other fashion brands have lately been “pulling me back to New York,” he said.
In the meantime, Twin Shadow is finishing up a tour, and Mr. Lewis is trying to make his stage presentation as compelling as his music. Two days after the interview, he would perform at Terminal 5 in Manhattan dressed in yellow motocross pants and a single motorcycle-gloved hand made by Troy Lee Designs. When Twin Shadow played “The Late Late Show With James Corden” recently, he donned a red beanie in a sartorial tribute to the “Let’s Get It On” era Marvin Gaye.
Mr. Lewis said he wanted to pay respects to a musician who is underappreciated for his style. “My friends and I were just talking about this footage where he’s in a rehearsal and wearing a track suit and sneakers,” he said of Mr. Gaye. “He’s doing the entire rehearsal lying on the couch. Casual is his whole entire fashion vibe.”
During both performances, Mr. Lewis wore his black motorcycle jacket, which he had with him during the interview, despite the day’s warm temperature. Made by the brand Lair, it has become his foundational garment (asked to describe her boyfriend’s personal style, Ms. Kravitz wrote simply: “Leather. Jacket.”) and never leaves him.
“I’m a loser of things,” he said. “I’ll have 20 iPhones by the time the tour is over. But this is the one thing. That’s why it’s with me right now.”
Some elements of rock fashion need never evolve.
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