The Style of Sound: It’s Not A Fashion Statement, It’s MCR’S Deathwish
From damned lovers to freedom fighters in a post-apocalyptic war, My Chemical Romance’s discography is undoubtedly concept-heavy. The iconic looks they’ve given us over the years are imperative to understanding how a record comes to life.
From the stage to the runway, The Style of Sound is a series that explores the intricate relationships forged between your favorite artists and their iconic fashion statements.
Written by Miranda Robertson
Photo courtesy of Kerrang!
Part of what sets My Chemical Romance apart from other 2000s emo-rock bands is not just their ability to make time-testing rock anthems but also their ability to create entire universes inside each record. Something that the band prides itself on is the story that’s created within each album. MCR’s albums are anything but light and usually take some thorough analysis to understand in their entirety, but the fashion choices incorporated throughout these albums' promotions, videos, and tours allows listeners to visualize the complex narratives. Through the core three records, Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, The Black Parade, and Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, lead singer Gerard Way had a huge hand in the band's fashion and appearance. For a majority of MCR’s discography, Way personally put thought into and sketched the members in clothing designs he thought would be best suited to their music.
Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge, My Chemical Romance's breakout album — as mentioned in Kerrang! and popularly parroted throughout musical sources — was released in the summer of 2004. The album chronicles the story of “The Demolition Lovers” (a nod to their first album, I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love) being killed in a gunfight. The second studio album details a violent man, dying in a gunfight and getting locked inside of hell without his lover, Helena. This unlikely protagonist is given a chance by the devil to have her back if he uses a gun to bring back the souls of 1000 evil men. In a shocking twist, he ultimately finds out that he is fated to be the 1000th man. The far-fetched concept album is filled with gothic motifs: vampires, churches, rosaries, knives, and coffins. These themes can be heard in lyrics such as, “Another knife in my hands / A stain that never comes off the sheets / Clean me off, I'm so dirty, babe” and “From the razor to the rosary, we could lose ourselves / And paint these walls in pitchfork red.” The conceptual colors follow a black and red theme with drops of white. These colors are prominent on the album’s cover, which features a pen and ink style drawing of the Demolition Lovers, based off the painting “The Lovers” by René Magritte.
Lyrics and album art are not all the four-man band relies on to bring their story of an album to life; the style decisions made during their Three Cheers era were key to enhancing the record. Way’s sketches for this album consisted of black jackets splattered with blood. These drawings were shown in the live album Life On the Murder Scene, which is a compliation of tour diaries during the album’s production and tour. The lead singer's signature look for this era is a black suit with a black button-down underneath and black slacks, a look coined by Robert Smith of The Cure.The accent of the look features a blood-red necktie and is usually paired with Way’s signature bat belt buckle. The rest of the band follows with similar designs, mixing suits with bulletproof vests and red and black eye makeup. Taken together, they held the appearance of vampiric ’60s mobsters throughout the album’s tour and live appearances. These brooding and bloody outfits set the tone for what “emo” really looked like throughout the ‘00s. The dark look screamed violence and angst, exactly what Three Cheers aimed to represent.
What followed Three Cheers would come to be known as MCR’s most popular era, the 2006 record The Black Parade. The rock opera follows yet another unnamed protagonist, this time dubbed as “The Patient,” who is a man dying of cancer. In the album, he reflects upon his life through each track. He must decide if his life is worth fighting for, eventually deciding it is with his “Famous Last Words.”
Image courtesy of Gerard Way
The main visuals for The Black Parade again invoke Victorian gothic, but now with an added military-style marching band touch. This is based on Way's notion of death appearing to someone in the form of their fondest memory. For The Patient, this was watching a marching band in a parade as a child. In passing, his death marches to him in a hallucination of a death parade. Way acted as this character throughout the touring for the album, cutting his famous long back hair and bleaching it platinum blonde to simulate hair loss from chemotherapy. The concept sketches for The Black Parade ‘uniforms’ are not only supposed to replicate military jackets, but are also a nod to the cover of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s The Lonely Hearts Club and Freddie Mercury’s iconic yellow jacket. Unlike the bold, bright colors of other soldier-esque aesthetic albums, The Black Parade focused on a lack thereof with its costumes and visuals. After all, this is a marching band representing death. Inside of the dark and mystical cover ofThe Black Parade box set book, Way shared that the band reached out to Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood while conceptualizing what they defined as a very “baroque” aesthetic. Best known for her work in “Edward Scissorhands” and “Planet of the Apes,” Atwood brought in true vintage Napoleonic hussar uniforms to blend Way’s sketches and pull from historic fashion to bring to life the undead marching band.
After an album considered the epitome of emo came My Chemical Romance's sci-fi-based glam rock-inspired album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. This record’s story and concept strayed far from anything the band had been known for in the past. The storyline for the Danger Days album stemmed from the colorful comics Way had made prior to the album’s release. In a post-apocalyptic desert setting, the band members play the Fabulous Four, rebels fighting against an authoritarian government called Better Living Industries (BL/ind) that has banned self-expression and art after a series of nuclear wars.The band uses their glam rock-inspired album as an anthem for anarchy while fighting the governments’ army in a radioactive Californian desert. Occasionally narrated by a Killjoy pirate radio DJ, Dr. Death Defying, the plot follows the rebels on a mission to protect a young girl named Grace from the government.
Image courtesy of Reprise Records
The dystopian, self-described “colorful punk-rock post-Mad Max" theme was furthered through the band’s style choices. The costumes and visuals in music videos and live shows throughout this era were inspired by the desire to depict free and colorful people (the rebels) against a monochromatic and sterile corporate society (the government).
The band brought Atwood back on once again to help conceptualize and later physically make the costumes. They needed extraordinary ensembles to make dystopian heroes come to life. Each of the Fabulous Four’s costumes looks like concoctions of bright superhero Halloween costumes blended with silicone monster masks, motorcycle helmets, and domino masks. The materials consist of protective fabrics such as leather and denim, apt considering that they spend their days fighting in the desert. The accessories the rebels adorn themselves with are bright primary-colored laser guns. These bursts of color make the band members stand out against the desert backdrop as the fighting Killjoys the album makes them out to be. On the other side of the fight, the head of the government's army, a character named Korse, dons black and white with his crew of cheap latex vampire mask-wearing dracs, a mind-controlled army sent to destroy the Killjoys and their rebellious efforts. There is a specific amount of detail on each costume, such as the grime stains and colored stitching, as well as the patches on the Killjoy’s jackets that are hints to lore inside of the universe.
My Chemical Romance’s music would not be as enticing without the saturated fictional storylines that consume listeners. These narratives wouldn’t be possible without the intricate style and costumes that make the story visually come to life. Now famous enough to have influenced so many more after them, MCR’s iconic costumes were each conceived to enhance the creation of a new world inside the music.