Design by Tyler Farmer
The worlds of fashion and music are intimately connected. Here’s an inside look at how design houses and musicians work together to soundtrack runway shows.
October 5, 2026
I was recently sitting at a cafe in Paris with a friend who was telling me about going to the re-see for a Dior collection. She didn't connect with the clothes at all. She walked through, looked at everything up close, and left feeling almost nothing.
Later that night, she went home and watched the runway show on YouTube. It brought her to tears.
She said it changed her entire perception of the show. What she remembers most was the music, and the way it seemed to change with the clothes and tell her how to feel. A dress would come out and the sound would shift with it. Something would build, soften, and then disappear. Another look would enter and suddenly the feeling of the room changed again. Clothes she'd looked at hours earlier now seemed to have an emotional logic. There was a reason for one dress to follow another. The show had a full story.
I've been thinking about that conversation ever since, mostly because it made something I had always understood instinctively about fashion feel strangely obvious. So much time is spent talking about the production at a show: the designer, the casting, the styling, and the set. But before we've really had time to understand any of it, something else has already given us the baseline for how to feel.
Music can make a beautiful moment feel uncomfortable. It can make a heavy collection feel strangely tender. It can make you nostalgic for something you've never experienced. In this case, it can make you love clothes you didn’t connect with a few hours earlier.
That's when I realized I knew very little about the people deciding what we hear.
Who chooses the song that starts playing when the crowd gets quiet and the show begins? At what point does a collection acquire a sound? Does the designer know what they want to hear, or just how they want the room to feel? And what does it mean to be the person responsible for translating that feeling into music?
There is a whole layer of fashion built around answering those questions, mostly happening somewhere away from the runway.
Fashion and music have always had a slightly obsessive relationship with one another. Musicians become references for designers; designers dress musicians until it's difficult to separate the person from the clothes; entire scenes are eventually remembered as much by how everyone looked as by what they were listening to.
The runway compresses all of that into a few minutes.
A collection appears once, in a room that has been temporarily constructed for it, and music is asked to help make that world feel complete. Sometimes that means playing a song everyone knows, but often it means finding something almost nobody does. Sometimes the music doesn't exist until the collection asks for it.
There are people who have made entire careers out of understanding that difference.
Michel Gaubert has been creating sound for fashion shows for decades, working across houses including Chanel, Dior, Fendi, and Louis Vuitton. Benji B came to fashion from another kind of listening entirely: years spent on radio and behind DJ booths, finding music and figuring out what should come after what.
Their work in fashion isn't simply about the idea of making a good playlist. It's centered on the amount of interpretation involved. A designer can say a collection feels like a memory, or a city at four in the morning, or give the music supervisor an image that has nothing obviously musical about it. The sound that accompanies it is the missing piece that completes the story.
When I asked Gaubert what a designer actually gives him at the beginning of this process, his answer was almost impossibly open-ended. It could be a piece of paper. It could be an entire collection. Nowadays, Gaubert says, it’s more about the mood of the show and what the designer wants to say. “They conjugate the clothing, the music and the set and everything all together,” he explains. “So it’s just a moment. It’s just a moment in time.” That process can begin with something as simple as an image. “I work with image as much as I work with music,” he says. “When people show me an image, it can remind me of something…I think my work is also very visual.”
A collection can start acquiring its sound before anyone has decided exactly what that sound should be. Somewhere between a reference image, a conversation, and a half-finished garment, another part of its identity is beginning to take shape. The path to finding the right sound is rarely a straight one.
Benji’s process involves plenty of false starts. “Eventually you find yourself at a crossroads,” he explains. “Sometimes you have to go all the way down that road to realize it’s not where you wanted to end up. That’s all part of the process too.”
In a perfect world, that searching happens alongside the development of the collection itself. “In its most ideal form, the music and the clothes come together so the two things get finished at roughly the same time,” Benji adds.
The room itself becomes another part of that equation. For Gaubert, the architecture can completely change what the music needs to do. “When it’s a big space, you have to fill it up with sound,” he explains. “It doesn’t mean the music has to be faster or slower or whatever, but it has to sound very full.” At the Grand Palais, that scale can even make something as delicate as folk or light classical music harder to translate. “Space is so demanding,” he says.
Chanel SS21 Ready-to-Wear
Of course, none of this is happening in isolation. Fashion and music have always had a habit of borrowing from one another. Sometimes, the symbiosis happens so naturally that it's hard to remember which one arrived first.
Musicians become references, models, campaign faces, even collaborators. Designers end up folded into the language of an artist until a certain silhouette or pair of shoes becomes difficult to separate from the music that made you notice it.
Caroline Polachek walked for Chloé. Yves Tumor walked for Mowalola. Sophia Stel walked for Ann Demeulemeester. Artists are parts of these shows rather than sitting in the front row. A musician can become part of the world of a house without ever formally belonging to it.
Maybe that's because both are already doing something that complements the other. They're building identities out of references, taking things that existed somewhere else and rearranging them until they feel specific to the person using them.
The exchange, of course, doesn't always move in one direction. Sometimes you find a designer through a musician. Sometimes you find the musician through the clothes.
Tucked inside Fashion Week, somewhere between all the things we're meant to be looking at, is a very strange way of discovering music.
Caroline Polachek walking Chloe SS26
Sophia Stel walking Ann Demeulemeester SS26
The experience changes when you don’t recognize what you’re hearing.
Fashion has historically been very good at finding music that feels slightly out of reach; not necessarily because fashion is always discovering artists first. Often, by the time a sound reaches a major fashion house, somebody somewhere has already been paying attention. But fashion has an unusual ability to move music between worlds. It’s a superpower, really.
Discovery isn't always about being first. Sometimes it's just about hearing something somewhere you didn't expect to find it. A record can exist happily within one small scene and then suddenly be playing while a model walks for one of the biggest houses in the world. An old song can be removed from the decade it belonged to.
That idea feels harder to hold onto now. You can Shazam a runway while it's happening (I have). Shows are livestreamed and cut into clips almost immediately, and someone in the comments usually knows the song. Brands upload their own playlists. A piece of music can leave the physical space of a show before the audience does.
Paloma Wool seems particularly interested in what happens after that.
The Barcelona project has allowed music from its shows to keep existing through playlists and soundtracks online, almost like another archive of the collections. For Spring/Summer 2025, showcased in Paris, the relationship became even stranger: microphones picked up sounds created by the garments and models themselves, folding the physical collection into the sound of the show, with Ana Roxanne performing at its close. The clothes were moving to music, but for a moment, they were making it, too.
There is also music that wouldn't exist at all without the runway.
Under Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton Men's became an especially visible meeting place for musicians and fashion. Dev Hynes performed within the world of the Fall/Winter 2019 show; a few years later, Tyler, The Creator created original music for the house's Fall/Winter 2022 presentation.
Benji remembers one of those productions in particular. “I once had Tyler create exclusive beats and productions, then had those arranged for strings by Arthur Verocai, and had them performed by the Chineke! Orchestra and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.”
It's an extraordinary amount of work to bring together for a show that lasts around fifteen minutes. Original compositions, orchestral arrangements, rehearsals, and a live performance, all created in response to a collection that will only make its debut once.
There is something interesting about asking a musician to make work for something so temporary. An album is made to be revisited. A runway show disappears once finished.
There is an extra layer of pressure that comes from this approach. For a few minutes, the music has to understand the pace of bodies walking, the dimensions of a room, the order in which clothes appear, and whatever feeling the designer is trying to communicate. Then, just like that, the show ends.
The music might eventually find another life, but its first purpose was to belong to that particular room, with those particular clothes, on that particular day.
A fashion show now happens in several places at once. There is the version experienced by the people sitting in the room, and the version watched live from a bedroom thousands of miles away. Then there is the version that becomes a fifteen-second clip, the version posted by the brand, the version reposted because someone recognizes their favorite artist playing on the soundtrack.
The music has become one of the easiest parts of a show to remove from its original context.
But what does that mean for the people choosing it? If almost any song can be identified instantly, does obscurity still matter? If a soundtrack is going to live on Spotify afterward, is it being created differently? If most people will eventually experience a show through their phone, are you still making music for the room?
For Gaubert, the room remains the starting point. Knowing that millions of people might eventually experience a show through a screen doesn’t fundamentally change his approach. “We do keep it in mind, but it doesn’t change the tone of the music,” he explains. “My only problem with that is that most people watch the shows on a computer, on an iPhone, so the music doesn’t sound the same. It’s very different.”
The show, though, doesn't necessarily stay the same once it's over.
Benji explains that he often has to think about two distinct moments: the live show and the final video edit. A fifteen-minute presentation might become a nine-minute film. A finale can be shortened, entire tracks removed, and music that was carefully placed in relation to a particular look might no longer appear in the same sequence. The soundtrack has to work for a second version of an event that can never quite be recreated.
There’s also the question of how long that second version will exist. “The show itself is 12 or 15 minutes, but the video of that show could be on YouTube for six months, or it could be streamed indefinitely,” Benji explains. “So there are licensing implications to using recorded music.” That permanence is part of what can make commissioning original music particularly useful.
The question isn't whether fashion still discovers music first, but whether music can make us see fashion differently, and whether fashion can change the way we hear music.
Photo by Flo Kahl
When I ask Gaubert what kind of energy he's gravitating toward for the current season, his answer has less to do with a particular genre or musical movement than the feeling he thinks people might need right now.
“Hope,” he tells me. “Positivity.”
This may not be something overtly happy, but music that doesn't simply surrender to the intensity of the world. "Music is a tool also to convey feelings," he explains. He talks about the importance of considering the time we're living in, the atmosphere within fashion itself, and the people who will eventually experience the show.
For something that might last only fifteen minutes, the soundtrack carries an extraordinary amount of responsibility. It has to respond to a designer's vision, occupy a physical space, accommodate the movement of the clothes, and make sense of a sequence that might still be changing the night before a show. It might introduce an artist to an entirely new audience, bring an old recording into a different world, or exist as an original composition that could only have been made for that particular collection. Eventually, it has to survive outside the room it was created for.
I keep thinking about my friend watching that Dior show alone in her apartment, hours after seeing the clothes in person. She'd already seen every look. She knew what the collection looked like. She just hadn't heard it yet.