How This Los Angeles–Based Violinist Shopped for the Perfect Performance Wardrobe
Just before COVID-19 made extended traveling impossible, Sudan Archives wrapped up her most recent world tour. The Los Angeles–based violinist (born Brittney Parks) performed in support of her debut album, Athena, which came out at the end of last year. London was one of the final stops on the tour before the U.K. put travel restrictions in place. She officially ended the string of dates Stateside right before major cities across the United States were mandated to close all nonessential businesses.
Athena is a lovely showcase of her varied musical abilities, whether it be her skill for beat-making, the soulful fiddling informed by the history of one-string Sudanese and Ghanaian violinists, or her ear for contemporary R&B melodies. Her tour, though, was as much a platform for her bold sense of style as it was her bombastic sound. In her music videos, Sudan Archives shows the full extent of her fashion prowess with the help of local labels such as No Sesso (she wore the superhero print straight from the brand’s spring 2020 collection runway in her video for “Confessions”) and dramatic winged corsets.
Her tour wardrobe managed to simultaneously incorporate similar theatrics while doing justice to her more humble Cincinnati roots. “I wanted to connect with that side of me,” says the 25-years-old musician, who conceived of the Athena tour wardrobe with the help of stylist Fatima Mohammed. “I’ve been really into lowriders and things that I wore in the early 2000s. I used to wear tees, sweatsuits, and Air Force 1s when I lived there, so that was a part of my tour because the album is about a Cincinnati girl moving to Los Angeles to pursue her passions.” Parks sourced much of the clothing around Los Angeles at places such as the Slauson Super Mall, an old-school swap-meet shopping paradise in South Central, and other malls and Pro Club stores around the city. “These stores are places I would go to back home, and I wanted to showcase that young woman onstage,” says the singer whose performance wardrobe included a silver chain-mail dress, a magenta corset, and an especially tricky white knit frock that offered little coverage. “I wanted to look onstage how I did in my bedroom—really intimate.”
The oversized tee with a photograph of a field of yellow flowers that’s pictured here was picked up at a gas station (of all places!) in Pacifica, California. “I didn’t have anything to wear, and we were road-tripping to another city, and when I went to use the bathroom in the gas station, I found that shirt. It was the only one there, and I wore it out of the store.”
With much of the world on lockdown, travel is pretty much off-limits to everyone right now. Still, Sudan Archives’s photo diary is a heartwarming reminder of the spontaneous fashions that are born out of life on tour—moments we hope to see center stage again in the not-too-distant future.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
