Everybody’s Watching Katseye
To borrow a term from one of their irreverent hit singles, this weekend Katseye reached another gnarly milestone. Much to the delight of their devoted fans—known as Eyekons—the viral girl group, made up of Sophia Laforteza, Lara Rajagopalan, Daniela Avanzini, Yoonchae Jeung, Megan Skiendiel, and Manon Bannerman, kicked off their debut nationwide tour in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The timing was perfect, arriving hot on the heels of “Gabriela,” the brash second single from their sophomore EP, Beautiful Chaos, which landed the group a Grammy nomination for best pop duo/group performance. (They’re up for best new artist at the ceremony, too.) Earlier this year, they also turned heads in an uber-viral Gap ad.
Those moments demanded a tour—and a tour wardrobe—that would solidify Katseye’s place in the ever-churning pop landscape. Happily, they have an excellent creative team behind them. “We wanted to celebrate their duality,” the group’s creative director, Humberto Leon, told Vogue of their stage looks. Leon, a co-founder of Opening Ceremony, worked with stylist Katie Qian to dress the six members in looks that both felt in harmony with one another and that show off their individual personalities. For help, Leon and Qian turned to brands like Guvanch, Brooklyn’s LVDF, and Adidas, which provided custom boots.
During some brief downtime before the first show in their Beautiful Chaos tour, the girls spoke to Vogue about fashion, music, and their status as pop music’s most viral act.
Vogue: You’ve done plenty of live performances, including at the Video Music Awards earlier this year, but how are you all feeling about hitting the road for the first time?
Megan: I think we’re all just so, so excited about this tour. We’ve been putting in so much work behind the scenes, and now that it comes to the actual weekend of starting, I think we couldn’t be more excited to just see the Eyekons, travel city to city, and show everyone what we’ve been preparing for the past couple of months. It’s our first one, so it’s gonna be insane for all of us!
I imagine choosing looks for all six of you can be a big task. Can you give us a peek into that process? What are the discussions like?
Lara: Each one of us has a pretty distinct style. At least for this tour, Katie kind of had a vision for each of us already set before we even came to the fitting. But we definitely have made a lot of Pinterest boards for our personal styles and for the entire group, and how we want the entire look to be together. Obviously, sometimes there’s looks that everybody wants and I feel like we take turns and we try to alternate. It’s never usually too much of a thing, because we are quite individual and each outfit is pretty representative of each girl.
Are there Zoom meetings?
Lara: I love a text. [Laughs.] We text a lot, but our team handles a lot of it. I think eventually as time goes on, we would love to be more involved in those calls and really in the details, because there’s a lot of time that gets taken up with rehearsals and everything else. So our team is awesome and they are very, very, very involved in the details of the styling.
Sophia: We were all extremely excited because we worked with Katie before, and the amazing thing about her and our whole team is that they really make an effort to learn each of our styles.
Speaking of tour looks, I know your team worked with LVDF on your own upcycled merch. What was the thinking behind that?
Sophia: [The plan was to] reinvent our merch to kind of make it Katseye-like, [so it changed] depending on who was gonna wear it. For each girl, it was very much something that we would want to style ourselves in. And it was really fun to get into the fitting and see the outfits. We look at the racks now and always know which outfit is going to which person. At this point where we’re at with our team, they really learned a lot about what we like. And we also learn about what we like, with our different proportions and personal styles. My favorite thing is to get on that stage, and I feel like the fans aren’t gonna realize it right away that we’re wearing our merch that you can literally buy at the venue. I’m excited to see them get creative and to inspire them to see what they can do with it.