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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.
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Punk Feminisms and the Fashioning of Alterity
Friday March 14, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Simon Ramo Recital Hall
“Punk Feminisms and the Fashioning of an Alterity” includes a listening session of “cacophonous” records
followed by an interview/conversation with the punk scholar and Professor of Gender Studies Mimi Thi Nguyen.
Covering topics from SoCal's punk scene, DIY sartorial practices, to queer BIPOC genealogies of feminisms, we will contexualize punk as a musical genre, a style, and a politics of apposition that does not conform to hegemonic/masculine modes of resistance. We hope to ruminate on how punk as praxis gestures towards alternative modalities of living and being in the world that rupture colonial logics of extractivism, mastery, and self-sovereignty.
Speakers
MT

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her first book, called The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages, focuses on the promise of “giving” freedom concurrent and contingent with waging war (Duke... Read More →
avatar for Alice Zhao

Alice Zhao

Brown University
Alice Zhao is a PhD student in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She received her M.A. in Curatorial Practices from the University of Southern California with a Graduate Certificate in Performance Studies, and holds a B.A. in History of Art and Political Science from the... Read More →
Friday March 14, 2025 12:00pm - 1:00pm PDT
Simon Ramo Recital Hall 820 W 34th St BMH 100, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA
  Session

Attendees (13)


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