There’s a myth that time keeps a perfect rhythm. We’ve built entire systems around it—clocks, calendars, streaming schedules—as though time were a metronome, as though if we could synchronise ourselves to its beat, everything would be in harmony. That’s the deception at the centre of March, which pairs fashion and music as though they could ever actually move together without friction.
Not discord exactly. Disharmony is subtler. It’s two instruments playing technically correct notes that shouldn’t exist together. Rhythm and counter-rhythm. It’s the way fashion and music relate to time in profoundly opposed ways, yet we insist they move in tandem. Let me begin with what seems obvious: music happens in time.
A song is not a song until it moves through duration. Fashion, meanwhile, exists in space. A garment is a garment the moment you look at it. You could stare at a Balenciaga coat for an hour without it diminishing, without it needing to progress to the next note. But if you sat through the exact second of a song 3,600 times, you’d lose it entirely.
Yet culturally, we treat them as if they speak the same language. There’s the obsession with “finding your soundtrack,” with dressing according to the music you listen to. Music festivals have become fashion statements. Designers choreograph runway shows with obsessive precision about the exact playlist. We’re convinced that sound and style are expressions of the same identity, the same internal rhythm.
Consider someone who claims to be an indie person. The indie aesthetic—thrifted, intentionally mismatched, curated carelessness—requires a particular slowness, a visual resistance to progression. You’re supposed to wear vintage pieces not because they’re current but because they’re temporally ambiguous. They exist outside the march of seasons.
Meanwhile, indie music, actual indie music, is obsessed with temporal innovation. It moves through your ear quickly, or it doesn’t move at all. You can’t wear a song for three years. You listen to it, it moves through you, it’s gone. Next album, new sound. Yet the indie person insists these align. They’re expressing the same constancy, the same resistance to mainstream velocity. But they’re not. The visual statement is literally incompatible with the temporal one.
I know a musician, a genuinely gifted person, who explained to me that she chose her clothes based on the aesthetic “energy” of the songs she was working on. When she was composing something angular and discordant, she’d wear sharp lines and monochromatic pieces. When she moved into a warmer, more melodic phase, she’d shift toward softer fabrics, earth tones.
She described this as keeping herself “in harmony” with her creative process. I watched her wear the same carefully constructed monochromatic outfit for four months while she worked through an entire album. The clothes remained static while the music evolved through five different compositional iterations.
She’d changed the entire harmonic architecture of the work, scrapped entire movements, discovered new resonances, and completely transformed the sound. And the clothes—the clothes had sat in her closet, kept their careful alignment, maintained their harmony.
She was performing an imagined harmony that bore no relationship to how these two forms of expression actually operate through time. This is what March is revealing: we’ve built our understanding of personal identity on a lie of perfect rhythm. We imagine ourselves as fully coherent across domains—that our taste in music reflects our taste in art, which reflects our aesthetic choices, which reflect our personality, which reflects our values. It’s neat. It’s organising. It’s almost entirely false.
It keeps disrupting the rhythm. Music is always ahead of fashion, always moving faster, constantly forcing you to choose whether to follow or to stay still. Fashion is always lagging behind music, trying to catch the momentum that’s already moved into the next room. You can’t dress quickly enough to keep up with a song.
And if you try to design your wardrobe according to the music you love, you’ll find yourself constantly out of sync—no longer current with the music because the music left you behind, but also not timeless because you were still trying to follow something. The actual lesson of March is that disharmony isn’t a problem to solve.
Fashion and music don’t move together. Your sense of style doesn’t perfectly express your favourite songs. The playlist you create for getting dressed is not the playlist you listen to while working. These are different temporal phenomena operating at different speeds, and the honest approach isn’t to force them into harmony but to develop a tolerance—even an appreciation—for the productive disharmony.
I’ve started asking people: what’s a song you loved five years ago that you wouldn’t wear now? Almost everyone has one. Something they cherished, that shaped their thinking, that moved through them completely. But their visual identity has moved on while the song has stayed frozen in time, a recording, forever the same.
Or the inverse: a piece of clothing they’ve worn for years, that they’ve become internally identified with, but that no longer corresponds to any music they actually listen to. It’s a fossil of an old identity, and yet they keep wearing it because it’s become comfortable, established, real.
You’re walking around wearing a visual representation of who you used to be while listening to music from who you’re becoming. And sometimes those don’t align. Sometimes they’re in complete contradiction. The real sophistication, then, isn’t achieving perfect harmony. It’s developing the capacity to hold these things—music and fashion, temporal and spatial, the person you were and the person you’re becoming—without forcing them into alignment.
To listen to something that contradicts how you dress. To wear something that has nothing to do with what you’re currently creating. Time doesn’t keep a perfect rhythm. Time keeps breaking rhythm. It keeps moving while you’re trying to stand still. It keeps standing still while you’re trying to move. And we’re all in there, trying to keep up, trying to look right, trying to sound right, failing at both simultaneously.
Here’s to March: the month when we finally admit that the fashion-music alignment is fiction. That you can’t dress the way you sound. That the person reflected in the mirror is on a different timeline than the person singing in your ears. That disharmony isn’t something to resolve—it’s something to inhabit, honestly. The tick-tock tempo of time doesn’t wait for your aesthetic to catch up.
