Why is Rosalía wearing white now?
Lately, white has colored Rosalía's universe. A white that evokes spirituality, intimacy, fragility, purity, and transformation. All of this to warm up the engines in the final stretch before the release of her new album, Lux, scheduled for November 7, from which the first single was released yesterday: Berghain. Here, color becomes the backbone of a style that is not just about appearance, but the symbolic dress of a new creative phase. Like the crumbs that Hansel and Gretel left in the forest to find their way back, Rosalía has been sowing, in her latest appearances, the clues to understand this metamorphosis.
One of the clearest clues came in September, with the Calvin Klein underwear advertisement. With an aesthetic of essentiality and ornamental purity, faithful to the brand's minimalist tradition, the campaign made it clear that Rosalía is not a mere model lending her image to a commercial assignment. The singer actively intervened in the creative and symbolic direction, as demonstrated by the choice of the albino snake as the central conceptual element: a visual resource fully inscribed within her new artistic identity and the symbolic universe she is building with LuxIt is no coincidence that the advertisement features a fragment of the unpublished film in the background. At dawn, a song that everything points to will be part of the new album.
In July, Rosalía gave more clues in the campaign for New Balance's 204L sneakers. Although it doesn't explicitly adopt this spiritual symbolism, it does reveal the same desire for aesthetic refinement. Also notable in this vein is the impeccable white Balmain suit with a rigid body that she wore at the last Met Gala, in addition to the numerous outfits she has exhibited at fashion weeks, all in immaculate white and which many have dubbed "white eraNor can we forget the same-colored dress she wore when she ran through a crowd of unbridled fans in Madrid's Callao Square last week. A dress that took on a mystical tone thanks to the golden halo painted in her hair, which connected with the nun-like or saintly aesthetic portrayed in the promotional image.
In Rosalía, aesthetics are always a necessary complement to the music and the staging. A proposal that contrasts with that of her previous album, Motomami, where the post-apocalyptic biker world was combined with tacky aesthetics choni and the urban culture of Japan to build a shell—as strong as a fairing—full of aggression and empowerment, with which to protect her newly found fame in a hypervisual world.
Now, however, things are very different, because, surely, Rosalía is also different. The visual style of the album accompanies the discourse: light (Lux) as evolution and introspection. Not just partying and extravagance, but a shift toward the essential that corresponds to a greater maturity, both vital and creative. With Berghain, dares to use an orchestral tone and a more lyrical singing, in tune with the spirituality of the Catholic imagination, to reflect on human fragility and emotional suffering. It plays with three highly symbolic colors within the Catholic tradition - white, black and red - complemented by sacred details such as sandals tied with rosaries. And, constantly, Rosalía incarnated in a Renaissance "sorrowful virgin", with the leitmotiv of the "painful heart" translated into an electrocardiogram that beats to the rhythm of her new stage. Also, some white dresses frayed, deconstructed and almost disintegrated by suffering, just as a sugar cube disintegrates in coffee.
With this stylistic change, Rosalía stages the passage from the exuberance of Motomami in the introspection of Lux, with an artistic identity that mutates chameleon-like in each of her projects, putting aesthetics—once again—at the service of her musical creation and her state of life. As she herself says: "And a moodboard in flesh!"
