As Prince's influence on popular culture continues to resonate across generations, this multidisciplinary panel offers new frameworks for understanding how his revolutionary fashion and style choices shaped—and continue to shape—visual culture, gender expression, and identity politics in popular music. Kirsty Fairclough examines the stylistic and cultural lineage connecting Beyoncé and Prince, revealing how Beyoncé's fashion and style introduces and reinterprets Prince’s for a new generation. Casci Ritchie proposes "embodied intimacy" as a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between audience gaze and a star's dressed, moving body, using Prince's electrifying performance of "Hot Thing" from the Sign o' the Times (1987) concert film as a case study. Robin Shumays investigates how Prince's style in the early 1990s innovatively merged Middle Eastern fashion, including belly dance costumes, with expressions of African American identity due to the influence of his future wife Mayté Garcia. Finally, Karen Turman examines Sheila E.'s “long fur coat of mink” in "The Glamorous Life" music video as a symbol of wealth, luxury, and social prestige, while also analyzing the complex socio-cultural and political implications of fur consumption. Together, these presentations illuminate how Prince's fashion legacy transcends mere aesthetic choices to encompass broader discussions of culture, gender, race, sex, class, environmental issues, and artistic influence.
Kirsty Fairclough, “Style as Legacy: Examining Prince’s Influence on Beyoncé’s Fashion and Artistic Expression”
Fashion is integral to the identities of both Beyoncé and Prince, embodying more than aesthetic choice and acting as a vehicle for cultural, political, and gender discourse. Prince’s avant-garde, boundary-pushing style positioned him as an emblem of nonconformity, fluidity, and rebellion. Beyoncé, as one of today’s most influential artists, has similarly harnessed fashion as a medium for storytelling, empowerment, and social commentary. The paper will explore the stylistic and cultural lineage connecting Beyoncé and Prince, investigating how Prince’s distinctive style and performance aesthetics have profoundly influenced Beyoncé's evolving visual identity. By examining both artists' use of fashion as a narrative and cultural tool, this paper aims to reveal how Beyoncé has inherited, reinterpreted, and transformed Prince's stylistic ethos to create a distinct visual language that resonates with contemporary audiences. This study will utilise a multidisciplinary approach, engaging in fashion theory, cultural studies, and musicology, to analyse how Beyoncé’s style pays homage to and innovates upon Prince’s sartorial legacy.
Casci Ritchie, “Embodied Intimacy: Studying Prince’s Dressed Moving Body on Screen”
Carol Vernallis (2004) alludes to the tactile immersive qualities of clothing featured within music videos, ‘we hear the music, follow the body, and feel the cloth’ (p.101). Building on film scholars Jackie Stacey (1994); Laura Marks (2000); and Vivian Sobchack (2004); alongside fashion and cultural researchers Barbara Brownie (2016) and Becky Peterson (2024), I propose the term ‘embodied intimacy’ as a means to allude to the relationship between spectator and the moving dressed star body. Audiences can feel an embodied response to the dressed star and choose to express this sartorially (Lamerichs 2018a; 2018b; 2023, Smith et al. 2020; 2021) but this also shifts beyond a literal visual representation to an unseen embodied sense of style. I also use the term to discuss the visceral bodily reactions experienced by the audience when watching the moving dressed star body. These reactions are often difficult to articulate in words and, as such, require a methodological framework to slow the active viewing process and enable a deeper understanding.
Building on my thesis, I will explore ‘embodied intimacy’ in relation to my connection to Prince’s dressed moving body, in particular, a recorded performance of ‘Hot Thing’ from the Sign o’ the Times (1987) concert film. Using a combination of watching and drawing, I demonstrate how to slow down and become aware of our affective response to the dressed moving body on screen as well as document garments thoroughly in response to the scarcity and accessibility of objects outside museums and institutions.
Robin Shumays, “Bedlah Bedlam: An Exploration of Orientalist Fantasy and Fashion via the Lens of Prince Rogers Nelson”
This paper explores the fusion of Orientalist fantasy, fashion, and African-American identity in popular culture, viewed through the lens of Prince’s artistry. Prince’s encounter with professional belly dancer Mayté Garcia during his 1990 “Nude Tour” led to Prince's designers incorporating elements of Mayté's belly dance costumes into his own fashion, subtly infusing Middle Eastern art and attire into his image during the early 1990s. This stylistic transformation paralleled Prince’s personal journey, including his symbolic name change as a protest against the music industry. That protest mirrored African-American engagement with Islamic aesthetics back in the early 20th century, when the Great Migration brought Black communities into contact with Middle Eastern migrants. Jazz musicians like Art Blakey, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and others adopted Eastern musical elements and attire, sometimes crafting new identities to escape racial oppression. Prince continued this tradition on the 1993 O(+> album and 3 Chains o’ Gold video, crafting a storyline with Mayté as an Egyptian princess and blending elements of fantasy and Orientalist imagery. The resurgence of Middle Eastern sounds and fashion aesthetics in the early 2000s will also be examined through works like Truth Hurts' “Addictive,” Lil’ Kim’s live “Not Tonight” performance with its Egyptian-themed styling, and Britney Spears’ “I’m a Slave 4 U.” The latter video, choreographed by Mayté, echoes Prince's influence, incorporating belly dance attire and movements that further cemented this cross-cultural style in mainstream pop.
Karen Turman, “‘A Long Fur Coat of Mink’: Semiotics of the Fur Coat in Sheila E.’s ‘The Glamorous Life’”
Although credited to Sheila E., Prince wrote the “The Glamorous Life,” which opens with the lyrics: “She wears a long fur coat of mink/ Even in the summertime.” For the music video, Sheila E. recalls in her memoir that “it was a given that I’d wear my long mink coat to match the story line and the lyrics… The off-white-and-gray mink was perfect for the black-and-white sequences.” (p 197). While a seemingly simple choice of wearing a “long fur coat of mink,” this clothing article represents not only a symbol of wealth, luxury, and social prestige in the 20th century, but also a reference to libidinal desire and sexual fetish. In addition, the socio-cultural and political landscape surrounding the consumption of fur extend beyond the limits of projecting and living “the glamorous life,” reflecting the complexities of its semiotics. This paper will analyze Sheila E.’s iconic mink coat as a symbol in the evolution of fur as a topic of debate in fashion through the intersection of race, class, sex, and of course, environmental issues.
