“I love the idea of people being turned on by the looks,” Marc Forne, Troye Sivan’s stylist, tells me. “That's one of the main goals.”
Well, mission accomplished. As temperatures have flared all summer, Forne’s work on the pop prince’s Something to Give Each Other Tour—whose European leg came to a close last month in England, before starting back up in Sivan’s native Australia in November—similarly turned up the heat. From sheer Helmut Lang tank tops to exposed ERL boxers, from studded Rabanne jumpsuits to a translucent all-white fit by Prada, Sivan and crew gave audiences across the continent a steamy, stylish show to project their hot summer fantasies on.
“I feel like it had to be sexy because of the dancing,” Forne says of his approach to the wardrobe. “Never tacky, but sexy.” For the stylist, that meant a lot of open zips, exposed underwear, sweat, and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Choke.” “It's quite basic, but at the same time, it's very impactful,” Forne says. “When you see that dancer with the pants open and T-shirt that says ‘Choke,’ I mean, there's a message.”
There’s a lot more to the tour beyond titillation—Troye Sivan is, of course, one of pop’s most exciting young performers. But that unabashedly horny approach to fashion helped the “One of Your Girls” singer’s nightly performances stand out in a musical landscape where so many pop juggernauts are playing it safe. And beyond that, it served as a tasty first course before Sivan’s other big tour of the year—the hotly-anticipated Sweat Tour, opening in September, which he’s co-headlining with Charli XCX, the pop phenom riding high on brat summer.
Sivan has always been a proud student of the great pop divas. In the past, he’s namechecked Janet Jackson as a trajectory-shifting inspiration, talked about the influence of Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” music video on his work, and publicly fanboyed over Madonna following him on Instagram. Many of those inspirations were directly referenced on his most recent tour including titillating stunts that felt right out of Jackson’s All For You Tour playbook, a nod to Madonna’s iconic Jean Paul Gaultier cone bra, and a homoerotic riff on Aguilera’s “Dirrty” chaps-and-bikini look, with ripped up Adidas joggers and a visible jockstrap band. By wearing his influences so joyfully on his sleeve, Sivan helps celebrate the legacies of those icons—a singing, gyrating archive of pop history.
“The thing is, we never had this conversation [to make these references],” Forne says. “It's always been organic, it's always been spontaneous. We would just start talking about something, then go into like, ‘Oh, why don't we do this top with pants?’ And then I would jump in and be like, ‘Oh, we should do Jean Paul Gaultier.’ And then this and then that, and things end up being references to older eras and pop stars like Madonna or Christina. We end up there without knowing ourselves that we were going there.”
Forne—who calls himself “a sucker for any big pop star”—was an ideal collaborator for that project. The stylist still remembers the first music video he was obsessed with: Robbie Williams’ iconic “Rock DJ” music video, which famously finds the British pop legend ripping off his clothes to reveal a tight black speedo, only to then rip off his skin and flesh to finish the song as a dancing skeleton. The video is both bizarre and titillating, hilarious and swaggeringly sexual. “I started being like, ‘What the fuck is going on? What are these people doing?’” Forne remembers.
In some ways, Sivan’s sweaty, Gordon von Steiner-directed clip for “Rush” is the 2020s equivalent of the “Rock DJ” or “Dirrty” music videos—racy, culture-shifting pop clips that proved both polarizing and unforgettable. As Sivan’s tour stylist, Forne takes his role in helping expand the visual world of “Rush” very seriously. “It's been just applying the fashion happening at the moment, and also the fashion from the past, [and] trying to connect that with the universe that they created,” he says.
We’ll see how that universe continues to evolve when Sivan and Charli XCX’s Sweat Tour kicks off stateside this fall.
