Chappell Roan’s fearless self-expression and glimmering presence is easy to recognise and impossible to ignore. She’s consistently upstaging other celebrities on the red carpet in her distinctive embellished grandeur. At the recent Grammy’s she stood out against the smart seated crowd in her clown princess glamour, hennin-clad atop her signature red curls. Chappell exudes colour in imaginative pieces, mismatched gemstone jewellery, shining tiaras and cowboy hats. Her style is like my make-believe childhood drawings of princesses come to life, imbuing whimsical childlike wonder.
When performing, she has been a Grammy’s princess, a VMA’s knight (dubbing her “Roan of Arc”), a Coachella butterfly and a jazz-age Casino de Paris dancer on SNL: her style portfolio is phenomenal, with compliments extended to her stylist, Genesis Webb, the visionary behind the artistry that we know and love.
Chappell’s style is both joyfully expressive and reverent to those she takes inspiration from, like all of history’s greatest artists. As well as this, Chappell is incredibly culturally literate and proudly vocal about her appreciation of the drag community, who she acclaims as leading inspiration for her fashion sense.
In Hulu’s docuseries “Faces of Music”, Chappell explains the reasoning behind her signature makeup. The inspiration for white-face makeup, along with its obvious ties to drag, originates from her response to boys from her high school calling gay people clowns, she states “if you’re going to call me a clown then I’m going to be the best clown you’ve ever seen and it’s going to be undeniable that I’m gay and there’s nothing wrong with that”. Her bold blue eyeshadow is attributed to iconic country star Dolly Parton and 80’s drag queen Divine who she acknowledges as having led the way for her. It’s clear that her makeup choices are intentional protestations designed to resist the stigmatisation of blue eyeshadow due to its associations with drag makeup or promiscuous behaviour, “everything I do is a f*ck you to the box I was so pressured to be put in and a reference to people who came before me, I have to just honour the elders” she declares.
Additionally, she’s also becoming a role model for a new generation of pop music in such a compelling way, seen in the way that she stands up for herself on red carpets, telling pushy paparazzi to “shut the f*ck up” at the 2024 MTV awards, and using her 2025 Grammy acceptance speech to call out music labels for the mistreatment of their artists.
What we learn from Chappell Roan’s style is that there’s endless creative inspiration in the diverse world around us, which cannot be praised without paying due homage to the queer and drag icons who pioneered the freedom of expression that we admire in Chappell Roan’s style today!
Image Credit: “Chappell Roan 08 (cropped)” by Jason Martin, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.