The musician and actor’s performance for the new Ralph Lauren collection was a showstopping ode to the Roaring Twenties.
Janelle Monáe on Embracing Old Hollywood Style for Ralph Lauren
Whether it’s taking over Central Park for his 50th anniversary or staging a one-night-only Art Deco nightclub extravaganza, if there’s one thing Ralph Lauren knows, it’s how to put on a show—even when, as with his spring 2021 collection which debuted this evening, there’s no live audience. To mark the occasion, Lauren enlisted the help of his regular collaborator Janelle Monáe for a black-and-white film performance in the grandiose setting of his Beverly Hills store, here transformed into a smoky speakeasy while Monáe does her best Frank Sinatra in a double-breasted tuxedo and singing a swoon-worthy rendition of “All or Nothing at All.”
“When it comes to music, I consider myself a time traveler,” Monáe told Vogue ahead of her showstopping performance. “I can find the beauty of music in every era, but being able to dip into this made me just fall in love with Old Hollywood and film noir. We went back and forth on a lot of songs from that era, and one of the songs I hadn’t heard before, but Ralph asked me to take a listen to, was this song called ‘All or Nothing at All.’ And it was sung by a lot of the greats, but the rendition that I liked the most was actually a young Frank Sinatra’s rendition.”
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Liam Hess
