Music and Fashion: Looking for Viral Synergy

Dan Black is staring down the barrel of the camera wearing thick black eye makeup and a skinny, pale plum suit, while singing along to a recording of his song "Yours." Other cameramen circle, while a manager, a publicist, the hair-and-makeup guy and a stylist watch carefully. As he reaches the chorus — "I don't wanna be yours no more" — he begins to artfully remove the jacket. Suddenly everything stops.
The publicist, Abe Gurko, who just called a halt to the proceedings, wants to make sure everyone knows that the last shot of the video can't be of the singer in the T-shirt. "The T-shirt's styled," he says, meaning it was provided by this shoot's stylist. "It's not one of the designer's."
Such forethought is key in a shoot like this, which is not a commercial nor an artwork nor a fashion shoot nor a music video, but a hybrid of all four — an exercise in content creation that is designed to summon up that most elusive of things: a digital video that will go viral.
(See YouTube's 50 best videos.)
Black, a taller, skinnier, more refined Billy Joe Armstrong look-alike, is remaking a video for one of his songs while wearing clothes made by Paul LaFontaine, who was head designer at such places as BCBG and Claiborne. HMX, one the biggest menswear companies in the U.S., is launching LaFontaine's eponymous line as part of a new test division; his first collection, which will be out this fall, is also backed by SKNL, an Indian textile and clothing company.
This video is a way of promoting both the crooner and the clothier. As fashion and popular-music newcomers struggle to find a way to break through to an audience in an increasingly fragmented media market, they are finding that together they are more than the sum of their parts, especially on the Internet. The two disciplines have had a symbiotic relationship for decades — Madonna and Jean Paul Gaultier helped define each other, as did Vivienne Westwood and Johnny Rotten. As recently as this spring, Burberry used young British rocker George Craig in a fashion shoot and played his song over the accompanying behind-the-scenes video. But the union is not usually commercially consummated when brands are this young. Both Black and LaFontaine are babies — even embryonic — in the brand world.