Photo: Getty Images Save Story Save this story Save Story Save this story Olivia Rodrigo has always understood the art of a good fashion reference and a costume change. On the GUTs tour, she had a rotation of slogan tees for the encore that changed from city to city. Her “ drop dead ” music video was jam-packed with sartorial tributes to Sofia Coppola and Jane Birkin. Styled by Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo, she’s established an on-stage wardrobe rooted in riot grrrl-esque aesthetics and romantic shapes.
On the opening night of The Unraveled Tour , though, Rodrigo swerved the backstage quick-change, wearing a dress that transformed while she was still wearing it. Performing “The Cure” at Hartford’s PeoplesBank Arena on September 25, she appeared in a pristine white collared mini dress with a sweet pleated skirt. Then, as the song reached its climax and Rodrigo repeated, “ I’m unraveled, I’m unraveled ...,” artificial rain began to pour from above. The white outer layer started to disintegrate before the audience’s eyes, eventually washing away to reveal a fire-red corseted bodysuit and miniskirt underneath—a pleasingly literal interpretation of the tour’s title.
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The piece was custom-designed and developed by Hussein Chalayan, and revisits one of the designer’s most memorable runway experiments. For his spring 2016 collection , two models stood motionless in white, military-inflected paper garments before hidden showerheads suddenly released water overhead. Their outer layers dissolved, exposing palm-patterned dresses underneath, punctuated with Swarovski crystals. Chalayan and his team had spent around six months developing the water-reactive material.
For Chalayan, clothing has rarely been a static proposition. The Cyprus-born British designer built his career around garments that move, mutate, disappear, and occasionally seem to defy their own material limits. His Central Saint Martins graduate collection famously included clothes that had first been buried underground and left to decay; later came dresses incorporating mechanical parts, lasers, LEDs, and crystal “pollen,” as well as his now-iconic fall 2000 coffee table that transformed into a wooden skirt. Transformation was not a runway gimmick but a recurring cadence in dialogue with design. His work finds a means of using technology, engineering, and performance to ask what a garment might be capable of beyond simply clothing the body.
The now-iconic fall 2000 coffee table that transformed into a wooden skirt.
The spring 2016 melting dresses were a particularly distilled expression of Chalayan’s codes. Inspired by Cuba and its changing political and cultural landscape, Chalayan imagined severe uniform-like shells washing away to expose new possibilities. “I liked the idea of a garment that could melt and reveal something else underneath,” he said at the time . Nearly 11 years later, Rodrigo has given the concept a second life: where Chalayan used dissolution to express transformation, she deploys it as pop spectacle, making the very idea of becoming “unraveled” happen in real time.
Olivia Rodrigo’s tour wardrobe has otherwise stuck to the pretty, grungy, vintage-inflected vocabulary she has made her own. There was a white ruffled babydoll dress by Dilara Findikoglu; a cropped graphic T-shirt with hot-pink micro shorts; a flared leather mini from R&M Leathers; and a tank top worn with vintage blue jeans and Vans.
The Hartfo…