Rock and Runway: Indie Music Has A New Uniform

In the genre’s formative late-1970s and ’80s era, “indie rock fashion” was an oxymoron. Today, Geese drummer Max Bassin and Bartees Strange are doing GQ interviews about their wardrobes, while Dior’s Fall/Winter 2026 men’s show drew heavy inspiration from Mk.gee’s layered winterwear. The days of hitting the stage in the same T-shirt and jeans you wore in the tour van are largely gone, but so is the idea that an indie band needs to fit a recognizable visual mold. Instead, a new exchange is taking shape: indie musicians are looking to the runways for cues, even as designers look to the musicians themselves for inspiration, turning the genre’s history of anti-fashion into something more considered, ambitious, and—crucially—less beholden to the old nonconformist uniform. After years of Hedi Slimane’s influence on the way rock and fashion have cross-pollinated, perhaps the more interesting shift is that indie no longer needs to look like what we think indie is supposed to look like.

Indie rock’s women—Phoebe Bridgers, Clairo, and Arlo Parks, to name a few—have already helped blur the line between musician and fashion figure, appearing on runways and collaborating with major brands. Now, slowly but surely, the men are entering that same orbit. Members of modern bands like Geese, Fontaines D.C., and DJO have fan-run Instagram accounts dedicated to meticulously cataloguing their wardrobes, while Sombr and Gene Gallagher, the singer of Villanelle and son of Oasis’s Liam Gallagher, have walked high-profile runway shows. Djo’s Joe Keery has taken his place in the front row at Louis Vuitton’s Fall/Winter 2026 menswear show in Paris. What’s notable isn’t simply that indie musicians are being absorbed into fashion, but that their personal style is becoming part of the conversation in its own right.

This shift in indie rock style shares some DNA with the broader evolution of young men’s fashion, where dressing with intention is increasingly encouraged and effort is now applauded. Chicago artist Sen Morimoto points to the ubiquity of “Birdcage-core,” a reference to the campy 1996 film characterized by wide-cut trousers, boldly patterned shirts, and plenty of jewelry: a look worlds away from Interpol’s black suits, early Vampire Weekend’s Ivy League chic, or the skinny silhouettes of The Strokes.

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Victoryland’s Julian McCamman is part of a new generation of bold dressers embracing loud colors and unexpected thrift finds. His style has evolved considerably since his stint as guitarist in the cult favorite post-punk band Blood, trading the genre’s more austere codes for bubblegum-pink T-shirts beneath tailored jackets and uniquely bold J.Crew button-downs. The result is one of understated maximalism: outfits that are playful and striking without ever feeling overcalculated. “

“I think anybody in the fashion world would be like, This guy has an awful sense of what goes together,” says McCamman, recalling how shocked his bandmates were that anyone would take notice of his clothes. “Colorful and comfortable would be the things, I’d say. I just try to pick stuff out that I think only I would want to wear.” The Brooklyn-based frontman is careful to keep his wardrobe secondary to the music, wary of performers whose concerts feel “almost like a fashion show for them.”

It helps that artists like Bartees Strange (born Bartees Leon Cox Jr.) and Sen Morimoto are expanding the boundaries of indie rock, both musically and aesthetically. Strange is both a fixture of indie rock and an anomaly: a critical darling who has toured with Bridgers, Courtney Barnett, and Tori Amos, but who is also, as he puts it, “a 275-pound former football player, Black guy from Oklahoma.” He adds, “I look a little different than a lot of my rock friends.”

Morimoto, a multi-instrumentalist and stalwart of Chicago’s indie scene who was born in Kyoto, approaches his stage wardrobe with an emphasis on ease and fluidity. His outfits—bright, chunky sweaters and well-worn pieces he’s altered himself—echo the expansive, fluid quality of his music. “Does the way this [item] makes me feel allow me to not think about how I’m being perceived?” Morimoto says, explaining his stylistic thought process. “I know I like how it looks. I like the shape of it. It feels androgynous in the right way.”

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For Strange, dressing is also a way of resisting the expectations of a scene that has historically had a fairly narrow idea of who belongs in it. “I like taking up the space instead of trying to shy away and not be seen,” he says. “A lot of artists of color in this predominantly white musical space might feel sometimes that they are secondary, or they’re coming into a place that they don’t necessarily typically belong to or feel accepted in. I feel like my whole vibe is trying to take up as much space and to be seen as much as possible, not only for my professional aspirations, but for the artistic statement that it is.”

That philosophy extends directly to Strange’s approach to clothes. “I’ve always loved oversized stuff and looser-fitting things. I like things that flow,” he says. “I love Vivienne Westwood. I love Issey Miyake. I love Willy Chavarria. I love a lot of things that are structured that give my body shape even though it’s round.”

While scene veterans like Strange and Morimoto are expanding indie rock’s fashion vocabulary, younger artists like McCamman and the members of Melbourne’s Radio Free Alice are growing into themselves as performers—and beginning to push their own sartorial boundaries. After relocating from Philadelphia to New York, McCamman says he initially felt pressure to dress according to the indie-sleaze revival. “I was wearing a lot of jackets on stage with pop collars because I thought it looked cool,” he says. “Now I feel so embarrassed that I ever tried to do some shit like that, because it was a byproduct of me not really being myself.”

Today, his outfits are “funkier,” and he’s considering drawing more from artists like R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe. Both McCamman and Radio Free Alice have also taken cues from artists they’ve supported on tour. McCamman points to his time opening for LCD Soundsystem, while Radio Free Alice guitarist Jules Paradiso cites Geese, whom the band supported in Australia. He singles out Cameron Winter’s “fashionably unfashionable” ethos, Max Bassin’s “conventional, classically cool” look, and Emily Green’s wardrobe.

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