When it comes to her A Matter of Time tour, Laufey isn’t the type of artist who will have a new outfit on every stop. “I’m playing cello, piano, and guitar, so it needs to be something I can hold all those instruments in,” the singer tells Vogue of her concert look requirenments. “I want it to be uniform so there are no surprises.” Still, the 26-year-old singer has a little something up her sleeve every now and again. Last night, for her first night at the Crypto.com Arena, Laufey introduced special, Los Angeles-specific colorways of her Bode tour wardrobe.
While a lot of pop-stars may feel inclined to create a distinction between their tour costumes and their personal style, the musician is a fan of Bode on and off stage. “I started realizing my closet was becoming Bode-fied,” she jokes. “I love doll clothes, and I feel like Bode really understands that kind of style,” she says. As Laufey tells it, her tour wardrobe was born in the brand’s Los Angeles store. “I’ve become friends with the people that work there. I was like, ‘I really want to wear Bode on tour,’” she recalls. “They were like, ‘Wait, really? We should get going on that if you really want to.’”
When it came to ideating, Laufey and designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla were on the same wavelength from the jump. “Their style philosophy, it’s so adjacent to my music,” Laufey says. “The inspiration that they draw—from theater, from opera, from ballet, from classical music—it’s all the same mediums that I draw inspiration from in my music.” Bode Aujla agrees. “I think that we’re kindred in that way because we’re very much passionate about our craft,” she says. “We’re innovative with the original foundation of our craft.” For the tour, neither the singer nor the designer spared a single detail.
The first act of the A Matter of Time tour presents a fairytale-esque scene, the stage complete with a princess’s castle and a swing. “The choreography is more fluid,” Laufey says. “So this needed to be something more balletic, something that moves and flows and also drapes in a pretty way as I ascend and descend the staircase.” Classical ballet and old musical theater served as the jumping-off point. “She had talked about a silhouette that maybe looked like Margot Fonteyn’s,” Bode Aujla says. The legendary ballerina wasn’t the only dancer on the mood board—so was the original 1890 Mariinsky production of The Sleeping Beauty. While her usual costume is a pale mint green, Laufey’s butter yellow LA look nodded to the city’s hometown team, the Lakers.
Laufey needs to be able to make a quick change from her balletic first act into the second act jazz club vibe that takes place on the stage’s catwalk, which is shaped like a cello. “I wanted something that really resembled this jazz, ’30s flapper energy,” Laufey says. To execute the quick change, the Bode team made the skirt removable, revealing a scalloped, embroidered miniskirt with strings of beaded fringe. Laufey was thrilled that, with a shorter skirt, she was able to draw more attention to her sparkly T-strap shoes. “They look like American Girl Doll shoes!” she says. “It’s like something out of my childhood dreams.”
Laufey turned to the Golden Age of Cinema for her tour inspiration. “I was really in a deep rabbit hole,” she says. Ziegfeld Follies was a standout reference for her last look of the show: a three-piece jacket, bedazzled bra, and fringed skirt. Once she removes the jacket she wears a sash customized for each tour stop. In LA, it is yellow with purple embellishments, another nod to the Lakers. “There’s this one scene where Lucille Ball is on a carousel with real horses, and the dancers are wearing these marching band uniforms,” she says. “It’s the most in insane display of Golden Age va-va-vaoom that I’ve ever seen.”
Sure, those days seem long gone now. But with the duo’s shared reverence for technique and craft, plus a penchant for theatrical glamour, Laufey and Bode are fashioning a new Golden Age.
