Maggie Rogers Finds Catharsis in a Haircut

A couple of weeks earlier than the discharge of her second studio album, Maggie Rogers continues to be grappling with its title. Give up, out July 29, is an ode to giving in, breaking free and discovering pleasure amid chaos. However on our video name in late June, Rogers is fast to state that she doesn’t but have all the above found out. Once I ask what freedom means to her, her response is understandably unclear. “I feel that if I knew that, I might in all probability be out of enterprise,” she quips. Even nonetheless, her new 12-song mission will get fairly shut. With the overwhelming state of the world, listening to the pop indie report looks like a liberating antidote to apathy.

For the singer-songwriter, few issues result in this emotional launch like reducing her hair. “It’s like essentially the most important me,” she says of the quick strands peeking beneath a blue paisley bandana. “As a result of you may’t cover.” Give up is one other vessel for Rogers’s vulnerability.

In 2016, the musician (then a senior in faculty) skyrocketed to stardom after a video of Pharrell Williams listening to her tune “Alaska” went viral. The quilt artwork for her subsequent debut studio album, Heard It In A Previous Life, confirmed Maggie Rogers with chest-length tresses blowing within the wind. The mission was her strategy to “set the narrative straight” on her sudden fame. However when making Give up, Rogers (now a Harvard College grasp’s graduate) didn’t really feel sure by any public expectations. And this time, she seems on the quilt with a face-framing pixie minimize.

Images courtesy of Common Music Group

Maggie Rogers has all the time gravitated in the direction of one of these bodily transformation. “I’ve minimize my hair tremendous quick each 4 years for many of my life,” she notes. “I used to do it myself after I was a child. It was all the time an issue that I might discover scissors and attempt to minimize my hair.” Come September 2020, she chopped off her locks in true quarantine vogue: with a pair of kitchen scissors in her yard.

“Each time I get a haircut, I really feel a way of rebirth — irrespective of whether or not it’s quick or lengthy,” she explains. “There’s one thing about that freshness, that pruning. Hair cuts are tremendous religious, and also you get to take away components of you that you simply’ve been carrying for a very long time.”

Maggie Rogers up close
Images by Quil Lemons

Relinquishing what doesn’t serve you is a defining theme of Give up. With its stream-of-consciousness subject material comprising friendship, nervousness and operating away, the album is a results of Rogers making music to cross the time, to not meet deadlines. “It felt like a pure artist factor,” she says of engaged on the album, which she started in 2020 whereas staying at her dad and mom’ home. “It’s about making artwork when nobody’s wanting and making artwork when it’s not in your job. You’re not desirous about anybody listening to it.”

After channelling all her emotions over the previous few years into the mission, Rogers says she was shocked by its undercurrent of what she calls “feral pleasure.” “It’s a pleasure that comes out of your tooth. It’s a pleasure that’s hard-earned,” she says.

The album isn’t just a soundtrack, it’s like a house you may go stay inside. “I really like the world-building facet of creating a report,” Rogers says, noting the font, colors and clothes featured within the visuals for Give up have been chosen with conscious precision. The end result? A kaleidoscopic color palette of purple, inexperienced, black, orange-y tangerine and dusty yellow. “I confirmed my pal the temper board and she or he stated, ‘That appears like a bruise,’” Rogers laughs.

Clothes has performed an enormous position in crafting Maggie Rogers’s new music period. Normally, she is aware of what she likes. “I put on one outfit fairly persistently,” she says of her tried and true uniform: a pair of Levi’s 501s, a white t-shirt or tank prime, a black swimsuit jacket and a pair of steel-toed Calvin Klein boots. “However I’m having enjoyable mixing it up proper now and experimenting.”

Maggie Rogers nautical shirt
Images by Olivia Bee

Currently, Rogers has been flirting with a sundry of fashion influences, from French vogue to nautical stripes to Victorian ruffle shirts. “Getting dressed looks like inviting the divine female or the inventive voice into my day by day. And that’s how I really feel essentially the most like an artist, in getting to specific myself in that approach.” Citing her love for androgyny as one of many driving forces behind her self-expression, Rogers is impressed by iconic short-hair references like noughties Agyness Deyn advertisements and ‘60s Twiggy appears to be like.

But it surely’s been a journey to get her hair excellent. “Once I take a look at photographs [of myself] whereas making this report, I’m so clearly in the course of a change emotionally,” she says. “So at this second, with the report popping out and my hair lastly feeling prefer it appears to be like good, it’s like a crystallization that’s taking place.”

Identical to her connection to hair, Maggie Rogers has an ever-evolving relationship with the idea of surrendering. “To me, it’s so deeply empowering and one thing I battle with. It’s one thing I’m nonetheless actively desirous about on every day foundation,” she says. As a listener, Give up doesn’t declare to have the solutions to your feelings, it simply welcomes you to search out energy in them. For Rogers, meaning feeling pleasure as a type of resistance, dressing solely for herself and discovering freedom in a haircut.

“[Hair] is definitely outdated components of you. It’s been with you. It takes on issues,” she says. “What’s so loopy is that proper now, as I’m within the midst of this actually fast transformation of popping out of grad college [and] coming into launch week… I additionally need to get my hair minimize each three to 5 weeks as a result of it’s tremendous quick. That, to me, looks like a logo of fixed regeneration.”

The publish Maggie Rogers Finds Catharsis in a Haircut appeared first on FASHION Journal.

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