CFP: 2025 PopCon/IASPM-US Joint Conference 

March 13-16, 2025

University of Southern California 

 

BABY, IT’S A LOOK

 Pop Music, Fashion, and Style at the Edge

Proposals Due: Friday, November 15th, 2024

There’s an enduring relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. As an example, in the past five years, the cowboy hat has once again gone viral, after figures like Gene Autry and Herb Jeffries helped make it a country music staple many decades ago. Iconic album covers, visual albums, music videos, and platform visualizers use looks to tell the story of the music, while fashion runways from Paris to Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg embrace pop music to stage the fantasy of a designer’s vision. Earlier connections between pop music, fashion, and style range from the likes of Josephine Baker and her banana skirt to Billie Holiday’s gardenia hair pin, to the Beatles’ mop-top haircuts, to the 70s glitter and glam of groups like Queen and Labelle, to the activist traditional attire and make up of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and Lagos 70. Pop musicians design fashion and streetwear collections, and pop music genres produce all kinds of subcultural media and other alternative means of expression through street style and beyond. 

And then there are all the musicians across genres and throughout the years who have dedicated lyrics to fashion, style, and the fantasy of getting dressed all up. Count ‘em: “Fashion Beats” by The Black Eyed Peas; “Devil with the Blue Dress” by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels; “Puss n’ Boots” by the New York Dolls; “Fashion!” by Lady Gaga; Elvis Presley’s “Blue Suede Shoes”; Nancy Sinatra and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”;  Sheila E. singing about wearing “a long fur coat, even in the summertime”; Trina’s “Long Heels Red Bottoms”; Azealia Banks looking “heavy metal and reflective”; Princess Nokia’s “gold hoops and that name chain”; Beyoncé’s “Freakum Dress”; Run-DMC’s “My Adidas”; Nelly Furtado’s “Big Hoops (Bigger the Better).” From Nacho Cano, and later Mexican pop trio Flans’ (and !Cholita!’s) “No Controles,” a song that speaks back to the censorship of dress and other forms of self expression, to rapper BIA reminding us she “puts on all (her) jewelry just to go to the bodega,” pop music and fashion clearly play off one another as a means of storytelling. 

As Leikeli47 raps on her 2017 album Wash & Set, “Baby, it’s a look.” 

But style is not always simply for style’s sake. Style can also serve as a form of critique and a site of rebellion. Not resistance, but creative rebellion, provocation, agitation, and revolt. Think Kehlani’s poignant refashioning of the keffiyeh in her 2024 music video “Next 2 U,” or ChavelaVargas, who played with gender constructs in the 1950s and developed a signature style that remixed the lines of gender; and of course Fela Kuti, whose style was part of his rebellion against colonialism. 

This moment is a particularly violent one in the world we share. How can style help remake the world? Across both pop music and fashion, style brings us to the edge: the edges of sound, genre, and possibility. 

 

For the 2025 PopCon/IASPM-US Joint Conference, we invite proposals that listen with intensity to the frequencies of creative rebellion, agitation, or revolt as they intersect with the edges of pop music, style, and fashion. We are interested in presentations that explore how style offers a new version, a remix, or an edit of the world we live in and the realities, struggles, and contingencies we face, leading us on a journey toward the edge of what’s to come. 

As a guide, possible topics could include: 

• Music, rebellion, agitation, protest 
• Edges/borders of place, sound, genre, style, and the possible 
• Punk, goth, glam rock, grunge, and metal 
• Hip hop style
• Hair
• Style and the musical subcultures of Los Angeles 
• Fashion, style, and music at the periphery, considering the records/artists/designers less discussed or popularized 
• Album covers / Record sleeves 
• Fashion shows and catwalk music 
• Vogue and Ballroom 
• Divas and icons
• Glamour and fabulousness
• Music, style, and social change 
• 1980s / 1990s
• Camp aesthetics / sonics 
• Underground / DIY
• Zoot suit riots
• Bling / Gloss(y)
• Music and streetwear
• Music and fashion film 
• Music videos
• Music, gender, and performance 
• Music and fashion photography 
• Leather jackets, studs, DIY
• Sequins, Sparkle, and Power Shoulders 
• Style politics
• Spectacle and sexuality 
• Collaborations between musicians and fashion designers 

Traditional papers, panels and roundtable discussions are welcome, but in PopCon spirit we are especially interested in unusual, self-contained, lo-fi experimental presentations, interventions, performances, critical listening sessions, collaborative workshops, demonstrations, and other non-traditional experiments in presentation format. 

Proposal guidelines: 

• Traditional proposals (individual): no more than 300 words, with a 75-word bio. 

• Traditional proposals (group): a one-paragraph overview and individual statements of up to 300 words, with a 75-word bio for each participant. 

• Roundtable discussions / workshops / listening sessions: outline the subject in up to 500 words, and include a 75-word bio and email contact for each participant.

• Experimental/Performance: outline the subject in up to 500 words, and include a 75-word bio and email contact for each participant. Ensure your experimental presentation is lo-fi and self-contained. 

Upload RTF or Word files (no PDFs) so that the conference organizers madison moore (PopCon) and Andrew Mall (IASPM-US) and the program committees can access proposals. 

 

Proposal Submission link: https://forms.gle/iFp4Q2x3mLqYiZ9w5

Questions? Send them to wearethepopconference@gmail.com

 

2025 PopCon Program Committee: Madison Moore (Brown), program chair; Jason King (USC), conference producer and keynote curator; Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (Hearing Things), Jill Mapes (Hearing Things), Kiana Mickles (Resident Advisor), Eddy Francisco Alvarez, Jr. (CSU-Fullerton), Elliott H. Powell (Minnesota), Rikki Byrd (UT-Austin), Alice Zhao (Brown), Yessica Garcia Hernandez (UCLA), Jose Anguiano (CSU-LA)

2025 IASPM-US Program Committee: Andrew Mall (Northeastern), program chair; Andres Amado (Texas Rio Grande Valley); Eric Harvey (Grand Valley State); Kimberly Mack (Illinois); Victoria Netanus Xaka (Cornell)

It is expected that IASPM-US participants, as in other conference years, become organization members and pay registration fees, to cover IASPM-US’s conference costs.