How Rosalía Reinvented the Art of Concert Dressing

The first time I heard Rosalía, I was standing outside of my abuela's apartment in Cádiz as her voice played from the radio of a parked car. The southern Spanish city is often considered the hub of flamenco culture, and I grew up hearing flamenco singers—from Camarón de la Isla to La Niña de los Peines to the local cantaora at the nearby tablao—but I had never heard anything like that.

When I went back home to New York that August in 2018, I tried to explain Rosalía to my friends. This was before anyone outside of Spain knew who she was, and the best way to express how she was remixing a centuries-old genre was actually by pointing at her chunky white sneakers. She wore them religiously to perform flamenco golpes (stomps), styled with crop tops covered in enormous ruffles, like deconstructed flamenco gowns cut up. Even then, her fashion conveyed her total project.

In the five years since, Rosalia seems to have retired these sneakers and moved on to performing in knee-high leather platform boots, but the effect remains the same. When she took the stage at Coachella for two weekends in April, she emerged from behind 40 dancers in motorcycle helmets. They parted as she walked out from behind them, her Harley-Davidson helmet lit up with pigtails attached to the shell. The loose pieces of her custom Acne Studios top (in pink for Weekend One, black for Weekend Two) flowed with the desert wind, encircling her like a medusa's snakes, her audience suspended like stone. "Una mariposa, yo me transformo," she snarled: A butterfly, I transform.

Rosalía's set reminded everyone why she is a once-in-a-generation talent. It's her velvet voice, hypnotic and classically trained. It's her contradicting choreography of fierce floreos and teasing twerks. It's her makeup, wiped off completely with a towel mid-performance so when she brings herself to tears later, as she often does, you can really see her duende in the wetness of her lashes and the redness of her cheeks. And it's the fit of ruffles, the oversized Rick Owens shield sunglasses, the boots she can somehow dance in for over an hour. It's the totality of her vision, fully realized through what she wears.

Her wardrobe has always transmitted the unwavering confidence of someone who knows who they are. Even as she raps about the metamorphosis of butterflies and drag queen makeup in "Saoko," from her latest concept album Motomami, she still says that ultimately, "Yo soy muy mía." ("I’m very much me.")

When Rosalía released El Mal Querer, the critically-acclaimed second album that turned her from a flamenco prodigy to a global superstar, her wardrobe was entrenched in her roots. The album was inspired by the anonymous 13th-century Occitan novel Flamenca, about a woman imprisoned by her husband, and in the accompanying music videos, she wore elements from a typical flamenco costume—the color red, engulfing ruffles, large gold sevillana earrings—modernized through nontraditional styling with those chunky sneakers, velour tracksuits, and long acrylic nails that she snapped together with a flick of her wrist, as one would a castanet. Her performance wardrobe for the tour followed the same formula. When I saw her sold-out show at Webster Hall in early 2019, she wore a patent red two-piece set from I.Am.Gia. that recalled the fiery intensity of a traje de flamenca but was built for the streets of New York.

Then came Motomami, her third album. Rosalía doubled down on her reputation as a metamorphosing sonic collagist with songs like "Hentai," an erotic ballad whose lyrics "Te quiero ride, Como a mi bike" ("I want to ride you like my bike") sound achingly beautiful because they’re raw and palpable and maybe something you’d actually say. With the new album came another visual transformation that didn't necessarily feel like a revamp but a slight shift away from her more literal "not your abuela's flamenco" reinterpretation of the genre.

When asked to define what exactly a ‘Motomami’ is, in interviews with Billboard and The Jimmy Fallon Show last year, Rosalía answered simply: "It's an energy." The term originated from a friend's old email but resonated because when she was a child in the industrial town of Sant Cugat del Vallès, she would ride around on the back of her mom's motorcycles. "My mom is the OG motomami," she often says when asked about the album title's origins.

A year before the tour started, she and her sister Pilar, who serves as her creative director, tapped designer Dion Lee to turn this abstract energy into an aesthetic for the stage. On the Motomami album cover she poses nude with long white nails for censor strips, an oversized motorcycle helmet obscuring her face and her long ponytails overflowing from the sides; Lee just had to figure out the rest.

When I asked him over email if it was hard, he said the challenge made him "excited and extremely nervous," but despite his trepidation, it was still, somehow, straightforward. "There was already such an established visual with Motomami. Rosalía's energy, the lyrics and the visual identity were all a rich source of inspiration."

She had actually already laid the groundwork for the look in her earlier album, most obviously in "De Aqui No Sales," a song with loud revving motorcycle engines drowning out the percussive palmas (handclaps). In its music video, Rosalía wears a red draped dress while drowning in a pool of motor oil, then changes into assless chaps and a bolero jacket constructed from a leather biker jacket for aggressive knee-jerking choreo.

When asked to define the term ‘Motomami’ himself, Lee says, "It represents the hard and the soft. The masculine and the feminine. Aggression and vulnerability."

Ultimately, he created ten complete looks in different colorways, all cycled through for different cities. When I saw one of Rosalía's first Motomami shows in Sevilla, she wore a simple asymmetrical white dress cut high on one side and tall red moto boots. In New York she appeared at Radio City in a white cutout bodysuit worn under a cropped leather motorcycle jacket with enormous shoulders and a matching miniskirt, the contrasting leather white and black details evoking the image of butterfly wings. A fan favorite was a deep blue bodysuit with bulky black shoulder pads and a pleated schoolgirl skirt with two belts fastened at her hips.

"The Motomami aesthetic felt like it had a total grip on the world during Rosalía's tour," Lee says. There were still some nods to flamenco, too; when she performs De Plata, a song from her first more traditional album Los Ángeles, a group of dancers clip the train of an enormous black flamenco dress to her skirt.

Unlike the other two major tours happening right now, Beyoncé's Renaissance and Taylor Swift's Eras, Rosalía's Motomami doesn't involve multiple outfit changes. With the exception of the clipped-on ruffle train, which feels more like a flourish than anything, she stays in one look each night.

Beyoncé's ability to turn out custom looks from the biggest fashion houses in the world proves she's the queen who can transcend the runway, and Swift's sentimental fits of sequins and shimmer build a nostalgic visual playground for her fans. But Rosalía's decision to stick to a fairly consistent look doesn't feel like a statement, or a rejection of the typical pop star need for constant reinvention. It's more like she knows who she is, so why mess with it?

Motomami is an energy, which is how she's been able to build a fan base with people who don't understand a single word she says. Dressing like a motomami isn't a costume; it's a uniform, a pledge. Instead of molding herself into the traditional tropes of what a pop star should look like, she's written her own script—quite literally: Rosalía has only worked with a stylist on a handful of occasions. Whereas other artists strive to meet the terms of their fashion contracts or impress a younger audience by wearing what they think will dazzle, Rosalía's wardrobe feels authentic. It's how she sees herself, not how she wants us to see her.

This month, she's kicking off a tour of the European festival circuit. For her largest audience yet, she enlisted Jonny Johansson of Acne Studios to custom-make all of her looks. So far those include red and blue gingham dresses gathered at the hip (slightly altered from a pink version that appeared on the spring 2023 runway), a series of catsuits worn under corsets with floral metal detailing, and her delicate cascading ruffle Coachella tops with patent leather pants, all styled with knee-high platform boots.

The looks feel one part El Mal Querer, and one part Motomami, the culmination of these distinct soft cultural and tough urban elements that have come to define her. The decision to do something different for these massive shows, made up of many concert goers who come to watch her set out of curiosity and not devotion, feels as intentional as anything else she does. It's an introduction for new listeners and a reminder for old fans; it's everything she's ever been, distilled in a look that feels genuine on stage.

Every night on stage, Rosalía's last song is Sakura, a pensive ballad named after the ephemeral cherry blossom. To the sounds of only a keyboard, she belts, "Ser una popstar nunca te dura / flor de sakura, flor de sakura / No me da pena, me da ternura" ("Being a popstar never lasts / cherry blossom, cherry blossom / It doesn't make me sad, it makes me feel tender"). In interviews, Rosalía often talks about how she knows her moment is fleeting, how the album that made her career was actually a thesis project, how she never expected to be here. And the image she is creating, the one people will remember, is not of a typical pop star offering a flashy fashion feast, but of an artist who created her own world—and then dressed the part.

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