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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.
Saturday March 15, 2025 11:00am - 12:45pm PDT
Moderator: madison moore, Brown University

Zoey Greenwald, “TURNING LOOKS AT THE CLUB: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY”

My residency behind the bar at one of Brooklyn’s most popular nightclubs; my best friend’s residency behind the counter at one of Brooklyn’s most popular vintage shops: our jobs, day-in and day-out; the wild glamor we clock into and out of.
The act of turning looks at the club has always been and will always be political. As queer people, nonwhite people, and otherwise people for whom the narcotic glamor of the club and of high fashion are vital to survival—people for whom nightlife may be safer than the daytime— a new internal social structure forms. Informed by drag and queer history, what we wear to the club is still, in constantly new and different ways, important.
Whether or not the club acts materially as a place of employment, the club inscribes and situates social politics and hierarchies. The club is a venue for the careful breaking of time—tracks spin into sets, stretching the late-night pliable; drugs open perception wide; dancing renders the body ecstatic. It is exactly this undefined and mutable state which allows queer life to thrive and community to grow. Within this schema, the Look takes on the weight of the Signifier—for which High Fashion is remixed and re-interpolated.But what happens when we, in these spaces, are interpolated into workers? Workers towards the club; towards high fashion? The question becomes: what can we take. No, literally: what can we take from this place. Teflar bag. Floor drugs. Anna Bolina dress. Shots. DJ slot. Gucci corset. Won’t fit me might fit you. Does anybody have a safety pin? A slicing moment of precious, slowed conversation in the greenroom. Ringing in ears. Rick Owens shorts. We’re going to be icons forever. I mean we’re going to be sisters forever.

Carla Vecchiola, “Unyielding Underground: Detroit Techno's Legacy of Resistance, Creativity, and Resilience”

Detroit techno is black music, born out of the city's African American community in the 1980s. Due to both geographic and cultural distance from mainstream music industry benefits, Detroit techno has produced a distinctive sound reflecting the city's unique cultural and historical context. This presentation explores how Detroit's techno scene used music as a form of rebellion and self-expression, laying a foundation for what would be possible in any future electronic music production.
Characterized by its DIY ethos and willingness to experiment, Detroit's music scene has sustained an underground culture valuing creativity and self-expression over commercial success. Examining the intersection of music and social change in Detroit's techno scene highlights music's power as a tool for resistance and innovation, particularly against systemic inequality and marginalization.

From the beginning, Detroit’s techno scene was futuristic. Along with Chicago house, it laid a foundation that influenced all electronic music that would follow. Detroit techno musicians have never remained stagnant and are still pushing electronic music forward. Therefore the original techno musicians simultaneously serve as both legacies and innovators. The current social scene in Detroit mirrors that timeless approach by being intergenerational. To be out in Detroit is to see 50 and 60 year old DJs playing for crowds that are multiracial, sexually diverse, and young and old—including parents who sometimes attend parties with their adult children. Detroit's intergenerational danceclubs offer a unique space for connection and innovation, evoking the strengths of the past while maintaining continuity with the futurism that existed at the start of techno in Detroit. 
Young, up-and-coming artists and traditionally overlooked early musicians share commonalities in their efforts to maintain an underground culture. Could this collaboration lead to more equitable compensation for underground artists? This presentation will contribute to the conference themes by highlighting music's power as a tool for creative rebellion and social change, shaping the sound and attitude of a community, and challenging dominant cultural norms.

Isabel Gurrola, “Runways in the Underground: Fashion, Sound, and Identity in Los Angeles Techno Culture”

his presentation explores the intersection of fashion, sound, space, and performance within the contemporary Los Angeles underground rave scene, focusing on a bi-monthly event that hosts a techno runway show. My conceptual framework of sonic spatial resistance is central to this analysis, which integrates Gaye Theresa Johnson’s spatial entitlement, Jose Anguiano’s sonic citizenship within Latino cultural citizenship, and Deborah Vargas’ lo sucio framework. This approach emphasizes the reclamation and repurposing of spaces by marginalized communities, where music fosters identity, resistance, and solidarity. These underground runways are heavily influenced by ballroom culture, where participants challenge and play with gender roles, much like the ballroom houses of queer Black and Latinx communities. Like ballroom culture, this underground runway lets attendees—especially queer men, women, and trans individuals—challenge gender norms through fashion, with queer men in skirts, women’s clothing, and others blending masculine styles. This defiance of binary gender expectations embodies lo sucio, as Vargas (2014) describes it, where genderqueer people of color resist erasure by engaging in non-conforming performances. Spatial entitlement, as defined by Johnson (2013), describes how marginalized groups form new collectivities through imaginative uses of space and technology, fostering belonging and solidarity in spaces such as speakeasies, warehouses, and these techno events. Sonic citizenship, according to Anguiano (2018), highlights how music and sound technology become tools for marginalized communities to assert presence and resist assimilation. The sonic environment of raves, often active from 11 PM to 6 AM, underscores this defiance through music that challenges silence and discipline. In addition, this presentation contributes to Ethnic Studies by illustrating how underground runway raves embody cultural expression, resist dominant power structures, and foster identity through sonic and spatial practices that echo decades of underground culture.
Viet-Hai Huynh, “Cosplaying Dystopia: Techno-Orientalism and Cyberpunk at Raves”
Asian American rave fashion has historically been marked by representations of “Asianess” through forms of popular culture, including anime, Sanrio, and Pokémon. However, Asian American rave fashion has recently shifted towards cyberpunk aesthetics, utilizing its grunge and punk inspirations to incorporate their ethos of refusal, rebellion, and dissatisfaction with society. While cyberpunk subcultures replicate dystopian realities as a form of social commentary, raves have often been conceptualized as spaces of utopianism. My paper asks what it means for the Asian American rave scene to embrace an aesthetics of dystopia through cyberpunk aesthetics when Asian Americans have suffered from the negative tropes of tecno-Orientalism. As David Roh states, Asian Americans have been contained within tropes of techno-Orientalism that frame Asia as a dystopian cyberpunk future (Roh et al. 2015). Scholars of rave culture have also argued that the rave is a less-than-utopic space given its racial exclusions (Garcia-Mispireta 2023). Building on this work, I argue that Asian Americans’ embracing of techno-Orientalism through rave fashion constitutes a refusal of the rave as a utopian space while envisioning new radical futures that embrace messiness and imperfection. Through their conceptualization of the rave as a dystopia, Asian American ravers contest the common perception of the rave as a space of belonging, community, and togetherness, revealing the inadequacy of the ideas of peace and perfection. I postulate that raves are alternative dystopias that exist alongside our current dystopia, a
Moderators
avatar for madison moore

madison moore

Brown University
Co-Producer, Pop Conference 2025madison moore (any pronouns) is an artist-scholar, DJ and Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He is broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive... Read More →
Speakers
ZG

Zoey Greenwald

Zoey Greenwald is a writer, editor, raver, and second-generation valleygirl working in the modes of autofiction, experimental fiction, poetry and beyond. Her writing has been featured in Document Journal, The Whitney Review of New Writing, Protean Magazine, The Michigan Quarterly... Read More →
CV

Carla Vecchiola

Director, Hub for Teaching & Learning Resources, University of Michigan- Dearborn
Carla Vecchiola is the Director of the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources and an instructor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, conducting an ethnography with house and techno musicians in Detroit. She is... Read More →
IG

Isabel Gurrola

Isabel Gurrola is a Muxerista and an activist-scholar from South Central Los Angeles and Norwalk communities. She is a first-year PhD student at UC San Diego, and her research explores how underground raves’ spatial politics and soundscapes serve as forms of resistance through music... Read More →
VH

Viet-Hai Huynh

Viet-Hai Huynh is a doctoral student in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Riverside whose research interests include Asian-American youth culture and its relationship with electronic dance music and rave culture, the recent proliferation of Asians in the popular music... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 11:00am - 12:45pm PDT
Zaro Family Songwriter's Theater Zaro Songwriter's Theater, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

Attendees (8)


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