The Deeper Meaning Behind Lorde's 'Virgin'-Era Wardrobe

Elle

26-06-2025

Five Gum, headphones, duct tape, and shoelace belts. Alongside a vinyl copy of AM by the Arctic Monkeys and a rotting pair of Toms, these are the items we would likely find in the time capsule of a teenager who came of age in the early 2010s. They are also part of the objets d'inspiration the New Zealand artist Lorde cited in the making of her forthcoming album, Virgin .
Lorde's inanimate muses evoke memories of Tumblr, the digital Wild West that facilitated a generation's much-too-early exposure to crash diets, cigarettes, and Maison Margiela. It is also where Lorde found a global fan base in 2013 via her ultra-indie, ode-to-suburban-despair debut single, 'Royals.'
The music video for the hit track set the tone for the decade: messy white bed sheets, harsh black winged eyeliner, and an authentic appreciation for lower-income suburbia. Spliced in between footage of a 16-year-old Lorde are clips following a group of shirtless neighborhood boys shadowboxing and sneaking into pools and basketball courts. Though the song and visuals convey a certain kind of strip-mall doom, the boys seem free—as boys often seem from the outside looking in.
This is the kind of freedom Lorde is channeling as she promotes her upcoming release, over a decade later. That's evident in her latest single, 'Hammer,' and its accompanying music video, which can be best described as : the sapphic Abercrombie & Fitch ad we never got. Directed by Renell Medrano and shot in London's Hampstead Heath, Lorde is seen donning bikinis, cocooned in a netted hammock wearing nothing at all, and rocking sweet little braids, yet she's as boyish as ever. She's tearing into a piece of white bread without pause (with gusto, even!), play-fighting with girls in a lake, and shaking the wet out of her hair with the uninhibitedness of a golden retriever.
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The themes of renaissance are felt throughout the video, with its various depictions of water, nudity, and wombs. They also run through the whole album, or at least the glimpses we've seen so far, from the lyrics ('I might have been born again') to the Ultrasound Tour. Lorde has been chipping away at the facade of who she's been and gestating in the raw, messy reality underneath. With Virgin , it seems, we're seeing a rebirth. A tabula rasa for her to express herself without any ties to a past—perhaps more commercial, or even more traditionally feminine—self. The naked truth within Lorde.
'It was really important to me with this album to document a femininity that is the way I'm a woman in the world,' she said in a recent interview with Zane Lowe. 'There's edges to that. There's no apologies. The body that made this album bleeds and aches and sheds, and I really tried as hard as I could to make this without shame…' The positive responses to the music so far, she says, is 'giving me a lot of faith about what kind of woman you're allowed to be in 2025.'
In 'Hammer,' she sings, 'Some days, I'm a woman, some days, I'm a man,' and I think about the avalanche of jerseys, jorts, carabiners, and Realtree baseball caps that has taken over the wardrobes of once-coquette New Yorkers. 'I feel like she's pushing her fan base to ask, What is my body? What is anyone's body? ' says Alexa Penn, a Lorde superfan based in Brooklyn. Though the wider shift from a scantily-clad 'brat' summer to baggier, angstier doomsday-chic wear predated Lorde's Virgin era, there's no denying that ultra-femininity or even casual femininity has been overtaken by a more masculine aesthetic and attitude.
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While it may seem daunting to find that rakish swagger within yourself—especially after a lifetime of avoiding it in favor of being a 'good girl,' as Lorde suggested in a recent Rolling Stone interview—it is not impossible. Take the androgynous outfit she wore in the music video for her lead single, 'What Was That.' In a diptych posted to Instagram, Liana Satenstein, the style writer behind the popular Substack NeverWorns, compared it to a look worn by Shane McCutcheon of The L Word with the caption, 'It made sense in my head!!!??'
For an overwhelming majority of chic queer women, the character (played by Kate Moennig) is the sartorial North Star in the long-running Showtime series. Or as Satenstein tells me, 'Carolyn Bessette but for lesbians.' Though the side-by-side comparison may seem obvious on its surface—Shane is wearing a collared white shirt and stomping through a Malibu pool party; Lorde is wearing a collared white shirt and stomping across a Manhattan walkway— it goes beyond the button-down. 'Lorde channeled that sort of unstoppable Shane confidence,' she said. 'It's hot!' And that confidence is clear in her music. 'The not-trying-so-hard-to-be-perfect is, frankly, the ultimate flex.'
The journey towards this, for lack of a better term, 'inner Shane,' seems to have begun after Lorde released her last album, Solar Power , in 2021. The album couldn't offer a starker contrast to the visuals we've received from Virgin —lots of bright colors, two-piece sets, and plenty of palo santo. 'This crazy optimism is not how [Lorde] started her career,' Penn says. The musician publicly acknowledged through her newsletter that though Solar Power is not what her fans expected, it was what she needed to create to get to her next body of work. Paula Lobo // Getty Images
Lorde performing in New York City in August 2021. XNY/Star Max // Getty Images
Lorde out and about in New York City on June 24, 2025.
In the time since, Lorde has focused on addressing her performance anxiety and relationship with food. She is also revisiting the teen culture she so deeply influenced. Enter the aforementioned Five Gum, headphones, duct tape, and shoelace belts. These accessories are generally considered accessible, but evoke subtle cultural codes in the right context: In the 'What Was That' video, styled by the much-buzzed-about celebrity stylist Taylor McNeill, Lorde has a piece of duct tape wrapped around her leather boot, a popular skater-boy alternative to torn-up Vans. Shoelace belts, similarly, have long been used to hold up dragging leg hems from the sidewalk.
Boyishness is in the details that often occur by accident. Small, blameless blunders that are overlooked in the pursuit of a good time. Tattered jeans, a cute shirt stain, a hole in a good pair of white socks. A scraped elbow, perhaps. The not-trying-so-hard-to-be-perfect is, frankly, the ultimate flex.
In 'Man of the Year,' Lorde's outfit is simple: a white T-shirt and loose-fitting jeans. She peels her top off to reveal a chest that has been bound by duct tape—we saw a wink at this in her custom Thom Browne look at this year's Met Gala—a detail she says felt 'fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment.'
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Over the years, I've witnessed many people rock a poolside-taped boob, but never quite got the appeal until I tried it out for myself. In an attempt to understand Lorde's gender journey, I went to my local bodega and picked up a pack of watermelon-flavored Five Gum and a roll of duct tape. Wearing baggy, low-slung jeans similar to those in the video for 'Man of the Year,' I took my shirt off and applied two big strips of duct tape over my breasts. I also chewed on a stick of tangy gum, which reminded me of high school, when 'Royals' played on every radio station. 'Being in your body without the discomfort of being gawked at or reprimanded feels intoxicatingly freeing.'
As someone who grew up going to topless-friendly beaches in Miami, I've never felt any sort of hesitation when it came to exposing my chest in public, but I have experienced other people's hesitation on my behalf. (A particular beach experience, in which a friend's ex-boyfriend told me to put my bikini top back on because there were families nearby, comes to mind.) If I didn't have breasts, I'd be able to walk into a coffee shop topless, mid-conference call, and buy an iced latte for all anyone cares.
I understand how a taste of that breezy feeling brought an album out of Lorde. Being in your body without the discomfort of being gawked at or reprimanded feels intoxicatingly freeing. Like you could find some instant relief in a blistering heat wave, sneak in and out of a stranger's pool with carefree swiftness, or eat a massive sandwich with whatever you want in it, and not worry about it at all.