Vogue (April 1999) p.S45-S46
Video Visionaries by Nathan Cooper
Today's music videos are as fashion-forward as the best runway shows.
Nathan cooper meets four top directors who match substance with style.
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VIDEO MAY HAVE KILLED THE RADIO star, but it has done loads for
fashion. Witness the influence of MTV: Ravers scan Bjork's latest
looks, Goths track Marilyn Manson's full-frontal attitude. And fly
girls spy Mariah's Gucci stilettos as she skips along to her pop-opera
nursery rhymes.
Right in step with demographic shifts in the channel's fickle audience,
the directors of MTV's videos mix cutting-edge camera work, seven-
figure budgets, and far-out references to establish themselves as some
of the most fashionable—if not always critically acclaimed—artists
around. Hype Williams, Mark Romanek, and the husband-and-wife team of
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are at the top of this high-style
Technicolor field.
If your name is Hype, you know fashion. Growing up in what he calls an
"extremely urban" part of Queens, Hype Williams remembers being the
only person in the neighborhood who even knew what Vogue was, much less
spoke the rarefield language of runway style. Williams was mesmerized
by the glamour of Lancome ads and lavish couture shoots from early on.
But, says the 30-year-old music-video director, "I couldn't see how to
fit myself into that world." Rather than sign up for sewing lessons,
Williams got into film and made music video his method for injecting
the high-voltage fashion he loved into a world much closer to home: the
hip-hop and R&B industry. Says Williams, "When I got involved, rap
videos didn't look like anything. Back then nobody wanted to look at
rappers, even if their songs were great. They had no face or image, so
I wanted to give them a profile."
Williams's videos, shot for a tightly knit web of artists including
Puff Daddy, Mase, and Mary J. Blige, are packed with the director's
firecracker signatures: color more saturated than a Versace printed
silk shirt, robotic-but-sexy dancers in front of stylized explosions,
and piles of cash, all short through a fish-eye lens. The look has
come to be known as "ghetto fabulous." It's a lifestyle brand, as
identifiable as the Nike Swoosh or the Vuitton LV.
As a court videographer for a flourishing urban rap culture, Williams
plays Michelangelo to Puff Daddy's Medici. The videos are postcards
from Puffy Land (all black, all luxe, all the time), addressed to
supafly "kids"—the very same kids Tommy, Calvin, and Ralph vie to dress
in their bread-and-butter jeans lines. "I'm 30, but I've got to keep
in with what fifteen-year-olds are doing," says Williams. "Whatever
continent you're on, the cool kids have the urban look. I mean, these
kids are religious about it."
Dodging the hype, Mark Romanek plays the reclusive artiste—the tortured
genius who shuns the press and lets his work do the talking.
Fortunately for him, Romanek's work roars. A Romanek video is a study
in provocative hipness. From the cyberashram he devised for Madonna's
"Bedtime Story" (which MoMA later acquired for its film and video
collection), replete with whirling dervishes and chrome hologram cubes,
to the computer-generated romper room he concocted for Janet and
Michael Jackson's high-speed duet "Scream," Romanek relentlessly pushes
the visual envelope.
The Chicago native has a lot in common with fashion's prodigal
firestarter, Alexander McQueen. The two troublemakers' feisty tactics
often test the establishment's boundaries. Two noted offenses: The
press slapped McQueen's wrist for reportedly weaving human hair into
outfits for his infamous "mad scientist" Givenchy show in 1997, and
MTV's censors pulled so many images (monkeys writhing on crucifixes and
a graphic medical photograph from the 1800s) from Romanek's murky and
carnal Nine Inch Nails clip "Closer" that he erased his name from the
credits.
Life on the far side is also one of the specialties of Jonathan Dayton
and Valerie Faris. The pair often mine their shared experiences as
teenagers in California for their artistic videos. The Smashing
Pumpkins' "1979"—full of kids cruising around suburbia with arched
eyebrows—is the apotheosis of the duo's take on teen spirit. Faris
says, "'1979' was a very personal video about the things we've gone
through. Things that relate to us."
Dayton and Faris began their careers with their groundbreaking show The
Cutting Edge in MTV's early days and have been living up to the show's
name with a string of award-winning videos ever since. Standouts
include the Hockneyesque "Pets" for Porno for Pyros, and a madcap and
send-up of Georges Melies's 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon for the
Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight."
Fashion's crush on video often reaches its most fevered pitch when
designers and print photographers get into the act. Alexander McQueen
sent Bjork into a faux jungle for "Alarm Call," the designer's
directorial debut, and Jean Paul Gaultier has whipped up costumes for a
bevy of videos, including Madonna's "Frozen" and "Nothing Really
Matters". Photographers Ellen von Unwerth, David LaChapelle, Jean
Baptiste Mondino, and Herb Ritts all have dabbled with the moving
image, directing videos with design-savvy flair. As more and more
style mavens straddle the gap between fashion and music, tune in to
watch music videos soar to new and glamorous heights.
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