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POP CONFERENCE 2025

Baby, It’s a Look!
Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge

March 13 - 15, 2025

Los Angeles, California

Presented by USC Thornton School of Music

With the  International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and Critical Minded


Over three exciting days of panels, roundtables, keynotes, and special events, the 23rd annual Pop Conference will explore the deep and complex relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. This year’s theme, “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge,” draws its inspiration from a 2017 Leikeli47 lyric and marks the first joint gathering of PopCon and IASPM-US since 2012.

Fashion and music are inextricably linked, from Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, Cab Calloway’s zoot suits, Billie Holiday’s signature gardenia, to The Beatles’ mop-top haircuts. Today, the connection between pop music and fashion remains stronger than ever. Visualizers thrive on streaming platforms; fashion runways in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg deploy pop music to bring designers’ visions to life; and musicians themselves blaze new trails designing streetwear collections and serving as creative directors for major fashion houses. 

But style has always been much more than just commerce or escapism—it has long been a space for critique, refusal, defiance, and radical expression. At its most powerful, style challenges norms, blurs boundaries, and pushes artistic and cultural frontiers, moving us right to the edge. 

This year’s conference returns to USC’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles just months after January 2025’s catastrophic Eaton and Palisades wildfires, and during a time of profound global upheaval and turmoil. The 2025 “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge” conference presents a remix, an opportunity to reconsider how fashion and music shape the world we live in, reflecting our realities, struggles, and aspirations while leading us toward the very edge of what feels possible.

Open to the public and free admission with conference registration on Eventbrite. Some events may require separate registration.
Type: Roundtable clear filter
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Thursday, March 13
 

10:00am PDT

First Person: Music Memoirs’ Audiovisual Aesthetics (Roundtable)
Thursday March 13, 2025 10:00am - 11:45am PDT
Music memoirs use first-person narration to print or revise artistic legacies by aestheticizing
intimate proximities between author and reader. As members of a book club dedicated to music
biographies, we are compelled by the construction of these mythologies as well as by our own
engagement, recirculation, or disavowal of them. Public School is a consortium of music
scholars, cultural critics, and journalists who convene every month over Zoom to talk about
various works of musical non-fiction. In our monthly conversations, we have identified several
stylistic conventions associated with music memoirs that merit critical interrogation. We have
also noticed efforts from authors and publishers to make music memoirs more interactive and
multisensorial in recent years in order to turn reading into an immersive experience.

In this roundtable, we focus our attention on four motifs that make the music memoir legible as a
distinct non-fictional genre. First, we consider the dominance of portraiture in music memoir
cover art and pay particular attention toward how memoirists like Lucinda Williams and Margo
Price use portraits to foreground their authority and legacy not only as musicians detailing their
lived experiences, but also as writers translating their virtuosity as songwriters into a different
literary form. Next, we interrogate how memoirs like Flea’s Acid for the Children and Prince’s
The Beautiful Ones use photographic inserts and unorthodox prose to reframe archival footage
of artists’ childhood photographs, promotional materials, and candids as scrapbook material that
strengthens readers’ emotional connections through nostalgia. Then, we examine the genre’s
associations with first-person address and reminiscence as articulations of authorial voice by
considering how divas like Mariah Carey and Barbra Streisand, and actors like Michelle
Williams who interpret Britney Spears’ recollections, have transformed the memoir as a listening
experience by showcasing their singular voices as narrators and recording artists. Finally,
building from Carey and Streisand’s innovative approaches to audiobooks, we consider how
memoirs like Hua Hsu’s Stay True and Dante Ross’ Son of the City enhance life-writing in the
digital age with supplements like zines and playlists.

Memoirs are also reflexive and adaptive to technological change. Thus, we conclude by
contemplating our own gathering practices. Since we are scattered across the United States,
Public School exists entirely online. Zoom’s interface affords us a particular type of mediated
intimacy during our conversations and interviews with invited guests that let us see each other’s
homes, even if we have never actually occupied shared space together offline. Furthermore, we
use Zoom’s chat function to distribute additional reading, screening, and listening material
related to our conversations, which we have archived in a shared Notes app list that we update
after each meeting. Historically, in-person book clubs have enforced a formalized mode of
decorum that is gendered, classed, and raced. However, the intimate proximities of the
mediated domesticated space via Zoom illuminate an aesthetics of reflexivity about our own
living spaces and dwelling practices. In this roundtable, we wonder what the remediation of
book clubs as digital salons reveals about the anti-aesthetic potentialities of virtual communal
engagement.
Moderators
CM

Courtney M. Cox

University of Oregon
Courtney M. Cox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Her research examines issues related to identity, technology, and labor through sport and wine. Her forthcoming book, Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Perry B. Johnson

Perry B. Johnson

Adjunct Professor, University of Southern California
Perry B. Johnson is a music scholar and cultural historian. Her research interrogates power and identity through a critical examination of American popular music. She co-directs The Sound of Victory, an initiative exploring the relationship between music/sound and sport, and is working... Read More →
NO

Nereya Otieno

Nereya Otieno is a writer and nonprofit founder. She focuses on intercultural spaces and the ways in which music, food, and the arts build communities. Her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times Image Magazine, Hyperallergic, Architectural Digest, Okayplayer, Whetstone... Read More →
CC

Chi Chi Thalken

Chi Chi Thalken is the founder of the independent hip-hop blog, Scratched Vinyl. He currently resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.Presentation Description"Archiving the Underground: Collecting the artifacts of New York's indie hip hop scene in the '90s"Hip Hop celebrated its fiftieth birthday... Read More →
AV

Alyxandra Vesey

Alyxandra Vesey is an associate professor in Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on the gendered dynamics of creative labor in the music industries. She is the author of Extending Play: The Feminization of Collaborative Music Merchandise... Read More →
Thursday March 13, 2025 10:00am - 11:45am PDT
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

2:00pm PDT

The Nudie Suit: Past, Present, and Future (Roundtable)
Thursday March 13, 2025 2:00pm - 3:45pm PDT
In the video for his blockbuster debut single “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X sparkles in an eye-
popping multicolored cowboy suit, with macho side-kick Billy Ray Cyrus crushing it in
shocking- pink buckaroo style. Since then, Beyonce, Orville Peck, Brandi Carlile, and Post
Malone have also joined previous generations of artists going back to Hank Williams, George
Jones, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Janis Joplin, Elton John, and Jack White who’ve worn
custom-made embroidered and fringe-flying finery to personify their music and their image. The
original name for such attire? The Nudie Suit. Where did that name come from? How were such
stage clothes used to define an artist’s image, background, and song catalogue? And how did
such a distinctive sartorial style evolve from the look of white male singing cowboys and C&W
stars to adorn a diversity of today’s artists? Those are the topics of our proposed roundtable
discussion, “The Nudie Suit: Past, Present, and Future.”

We’ll start with Nutya Kotlyrenko (1902-1984), the son of a Jewish bootmaker who immigrated
from the Ukraine to New York in 1913 – renamed “Nudie” Cohn at Ellis Island. Nudie spent
decades hustling on show-biz margins (vaudevillian Eddie Cantor’s errand boy, featherweight
boxer, B-movie extra) and the garment business – opening Nudie’s for the Ladies, where Times
Square burlesque queens ordered their rhinestone G-strings. In 1949, Nudie established a North
Hollywood shop where singing cowboys and country & western stars congregated and ordered
custom finery. Nudie’s designs reflected the American melting pot, including elements from
Eastern European/Slavic, Mexican, North African, and Native American traditions, combined to
create unique folk-art masterpieces. One of three eastern European immigrants who helped shape
our notion of fancy western attire, Nudie took the trend for elaborately decorated western
garments to new heights, utilizing the rhinestones he first encountered in burlesque. From 1949
to 1983, Nudie designed hundreds of eye-catching suits, including Elvis Presley’s gold lamé
tuxedo with rhinestone-studded lapels. Embellished with figurative embroidery, gems, and
metallic threads, Nudie’s flamboyant costumes became de rigueur among Grand Ole Opry stars
and celluloid cowboys like Gene Autry. Nudie’s head designer in the late ‘50s, Manuel Cuevas,
was followed by fellow Mexican immigrant Jaime Castaneda. Behind the scenes, women such as

Rose Clements and Nudie’s wife Bobbie were also responsible for much of the imaginative
embroidery.

In effect, Nudie Suits were the precursor of the music video, with clever embroidery illustrating
a hit song - like Webb Pierce’s “In the Jailhouse Now” outfit, decorated with a buckaroo behind
bars - or a performer’s personal symbols - such as Opry star Porter Wagoner’s embroidered
wagon wheels - or Gram Parsons’ provocative sex, drugs & rock & roll imagery. Parsons’ “Sin
City” suit, embroidered with cannabis leaves and pharmaceuticals, as well as outfits made for
Elton John, the Byrds’ Chris Hillman and Roger McGuinn, Janis Joplin, and members of the
Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, and Grateful Dead took the suits to a new audience. “A Nudie Suit was
a walking canvas,” says Chris Hillman. Janis wrote to a friend, “I’m getting a pants and vest
outfit. Purple w/flowers & scroll work, encrusted w/all sorts of colored rhinestones. Real flashy
colored rhinestones!” Though the suits fell out of fashion in Nashville, they were brought back in
the ‘80s by upstarts Marty Stuart, Dwight Yoakam, and Chris Hillman and his Desert Rose Band,
who began ordering custom gear from Manuel and Jaime. Yet another generation’s embrace was
hinted at in 2018, when Grammy-nominated Kesha wore a vintage Nudie suit on the Red Carpet
and in 2019 when Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performed at the Oscars in matching
vintage Nudies. Today artists like Beyonce, Post Malone and Orville Peck have embraced their
own Nudie suit style.

Our lively roundtable discussion will include appropriately attired experts on Nudie suits and
those who wear them. We’ll hear behind-the-scenes stories about the evolution of the Nudie suit
and how it’s been used to convey diverse messaging from performers. We will present dazzling
images of Nudie suits from the 1950s to today.
Moderators
HG

Holly George-Warren

Author
Holly George-Warren is the coauthor of How the West Was Worn: A History of Western Wear (a companion to the traveling museum exhibition by that name) and the New York Times bestseller Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones (with Dolly Parton), as well as award-winning biographies... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Brenda Colladay

Brenda Colladay

Brenda Colladay is a public historian with over 25 years of experience researching, building, and caring for collections; curating and directing the development of museum exhibits; and supervising preservation projects for institutions including the Grand Ole Opry, Ryman Auditorium... Read More →
PD

Petrine Day Mitchum

Petrine Day Mitchum is a journalist, the author of Hollywood Hoofbeats: The Fascinating Story of Horses in Movies & Televison, and former Hollywood story editor and screenplay analyst. An award-winning filmmaker, she was a coproducer of Stewart/Mitchum, Two Faces of America, a documentary... Read More →
CH

Chris Hillman

Chris Hillman is a founding member of the Byrds, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and the Desert Rose Band. A regular at Nudie’s in the 1960s and ‘70s, and a client of both Manuel and Jaime, the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Time Between: My Life... Read More →
CH

Catherine Hahn

Catherine Hahn is a Los Angeles-based costume designer and stylist known for her distinctive, one-of-a-kind creations. She has collaborated with artists such as Post Malone, Orville Peck, Thomas Rhett, and Sierra Ferrell, among many others. She was the costume designer behind the... Read More →
Thursday March 13, 2025 2:00pm - 3:45pm PDT
USC Carson Television Center 3450 Watt Way, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA
 
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