The eternal and contradictory ecstasy of the rock star That is, fashion's strange relationship with what remains of rock

Yesterday, after many months of waiting, Baz Luhrmann's biopic Elvis arrived in Italian theaters. The film's release and success are linked as much to the myth of history's first rock star as to that of his style - a style that, in Luhrmann's film, is almost more bombastic and inflamed than in real life and that has already involved, in the preliminary stages of its release, two fashion heavyweights: Miuccia Prada, who has collaborated with costume designer Catherine Martin to sign the outfits of the film's characters with archival pieces from Prada and Miu Miu revisited for the occasion; and Hedi Slimane, who has begun to dress the film's star Austin Butler at all his events and red carpets, alongside his fiancée, model Kaia Gerber, already one of the faces of Celine and its campaigns. Also in recent days, Hedi Slimane enlisted one of the most iconic rock stars of our time, Jack White, for his Portrait of a Musician series. During the last Milan Fashion Week, on the other hand, Alessandro Michele co-designed the Gucci HA HA HA capsule collection with Harry Styles, who is more of a pop star than a rock star, but whose stylistic kinship with David Bowie (and thus whose rock ancestry) is irrefutable. Add to this the recent tightening of the relationship between Gucci itself and Maneskin and to the presence of the Icelandic rock group Kaleo's music in Emporio Armani's perfume ads, but also to the presence, at Dolce & Gabbana's show last January, of Machine Gun Kelly, who after frequenting the rap scene has recycled himself as a rock star. The question therefore arises: has fashion fallen back in love with the electric guitar?

Cleansed of its violent and outrageous attitudes, clothed in sequins and androgyny, glam rock represents perhaps the central reference for stylists and editors today, along with the psychedelic scene and the personal style of the likes of Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, and so on. The playful glam current, which rejected the incendiary anarchic velleities of earlier rock and embraced the commerciality of mass audiences, rebelled against the rebellion of 1960s rock, throwing itself headlong into the theatricality and polyformism that our times craving ever-new sensory stimuli need. Harry Styles, Maneskin, Baz Luhrmann's Elvis (which is different from the historical one), Machine Gun Kelly and even the scandalous Marilyn Manson are all children, some more and some less, of glam rock. 

Specifically with Harry Styles we see the biggest difference between rock stars of today and yesterday: these days a video circulates in which Styles interrupts a concert to find his old schoolteacher in the audience and thanks her on his knees in the midst of the delirious audience - practically an apotheosis of good feelings that shows well what kind of public figure our society has an appetite for. Wholesomeness replaces edginess, adherence to humanitarian causes takes over in place of excesses and profligacy, and even sex, so flaunted by the Maneskin always half-naked, laced in orgiastic poses and covered with S&M straps, never translates into borderline attitude but remains a decoration, a purely performative element that is disposed of, at the end of the concert, along with the stage costumes. 

What, then, will remain of the rock star? A pair of pointed boots, black nail polish on the nails, an overpriced leather jacket? Or is rock an attitude, a rebellion? But rebellion against what and whom? The fashion and pop culture world's obsession with rock stars is just proof that, in our society, there is no longer room for those countercultures whose memory we so avidly evoke. Our icons are no longer subversives and seditious people who set guitars on fire on stage but simple good people, kind and tolerant people, maybe even people who stopped smoking during the pandemic and never did drugs or alcohol (or so they say). Yet it was those bad people who over the years provided us with the icons that today's brands mass-produce and resell to us in boutiques under the risky and exciting guise of a pre-packaged, sanitized and, all in all, harmless rebellion. To posterity the arduous judgment.