Lorde’s ‘Virgin’ Is Transparent, But Her Fashion Is All Gray

Lorde is not a person to mince her words. During the lead-up to her fourth studio album, Virgin, she’s been releasing all-caps, Juliana Huxtable-style releases on her website. To describe the color of her album (she’s famously a synesthetic), she wrote: “THE COLOUR OF THE ALBUM IS CLEAR. LIKE BATHWATER, WINDOWS, ICE, SPIT. FULL TRANSPARENCY.” While the album might be clear (and the cover an actual hip X-ray), the fashion she’s been wearing is horny grays and whites.

In the first album-announcement decree, she also stated the intent of the album reflecting her femininity: “RAW, PRIMAL, INNOCENT, ELEGANT, OPENHEARTED, SPIRITUAL, MASC.” She croons on “Hammer” that “some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” and indeed, she’s never embraced gender f*ckery more than dressing for this. Her first big public appearance was at Coachella, where she got caught in an “Indio haze” performing “Girl, so confusing” with Charli XCX in a gray T-shirt, off-white Dickies, and a silver crossbody chain.

This largely set the tone for the clothing she’d wear the rest of the year, with reflection, opacity versus sheer, and ambiguity at the heart of it all. She wore a svelte optical-illusion Thom Browne gray cummerbund ‘fit to the Met Gala, and elsewhere showed up in tones of gray, beige, and white, marking a palate-cleansing moment with as little interruptions to the heart of the matter as possible. Her directness in lyrics matches how she’s presenting herself to the world. If Solar Power was yellow and Melodrama was dark blues and purples, Virgin is the purity of the “liquid crystal” (aka a cellphone) and the righteousness of an almost monastic, hyper-futuristic dress code.

Lorde enlisted an A-list creative team for Virgin, including creative director Thistle Brown and stylist Taylor McNeill, who has helped Lorde pick less obvious fashion and dress her body in the in-between, transitory nature of the album. It meshes in with the ambivalence in gender and presentation she laments on “Hammer,” some days opting for garments that embrace her body, other days leaning away from it. She also is choosing jewelry as talismans, not unlike her Snow Peak rainbow water bottle, arming herself with mystical energy — if you’re into that kind of thing; otherwise, it’s just solid metal contrasting the plain fabrics she has on. The one constant? She looks different than everyone else, and looks really f*cking cool doing it.