It drives me crazy when studios put out making-of featurettes from films that are yet to release. It feels like more than ever, we’re getting the explanation before the art. Today’s cultural landscape is outcome-oriented to a fault, obsessed with the hard evidence of box-office, views, listens. But it’s also intensely process-curious, zeroing in on the details of creation even before the final work is out.
In this backwards-looping culture, the mood board has acquired an exalted status. Anyone with a Pinterest account has made these: collections of stills, clips, sounds, fashions, textures, anything that could serve as inspiration or vision statement for a future project. The more popular the completed work, the more interest in its mood board, whether pre-assembled or after the fact. And if you’re famous enough, you can just present your mood board as art.
On her eighth studio album, Charli xcx throws together muses without worrying too much about how exactly they fit together. Music, Fashion, Film is a ragged but surprisingly resonant mood board, an 11-track album and an accompanying 42-minute film directed by Charli. BRAT (2024) was such a zeitgeist-capturing success that a follow-up with the same brash party ethos was likely to flounder. Charli had already made a left turn from this with her lush soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (2026). Her latest is another sharp turn: minimalist alt-dance-rock, heavily indebted to The Strokes.
If Music, Fashion, Film sounds like a lofty mission statement, Charli quickly cuts it down to size. The album cover has Martin Scorsese, John Cale and Marc Jacobs, but Charli doesn’t position herself as a fellow artist, just an admirer. She notes at the start of the film that despite her life revolving around music, fashion and film, she’s “not an expert in any of them”. Rather, as she sings over distorted guitars on the album opener, ‘Rock Music’, “Me and my friends, we go out/ We take pictures and make stuff together”. That simple, except of course it’s not. On ‘Card Declined’, she dreams up a shopping list: handbag, perfume, a Mah Jong sofa, a new apartment, Jaeger-Lecoultre. It’s the Charli paradox: No one makes pop stardom seem as casually tossed-off while constantly dropping details of a life that’s anything but ordinary.
Unlike, say, Beyoncé’s ambitious visual album for Lemonade (2016), Charli’s film strings together “videos” for the 11 tracks, with short, context-setting interludes. They’re chaotic fun, some in colour, some black and white, a lot of hand-held camera and quick edits. She’s lip-syncing in some; others have her posing for photographers, vamping to her reflection, walking the streets of Paris, fooling around on a farm, in designer shirts and dresses and lingerie. For 2007, the screen fills with dozens of Charli TikToks as she looks back at the time she was just starting out (“I can take you to heaven like it’s 2007”). There are a few nice filmic touches—the single-take ‘Camera’, the colliding, meshing images of ‘Rock Music’, the eerie montage that closes ‘No One Lasts Forever’.
We get further glimpses of Charli’s mood board—and moods—in the individual videos released. For the wistful alt-rock track ‘SS26’, she’s modelling couture at a show before a stumble in high heels signals a doomy turn that culminates in models falling off a ramp into nothingness (“Yeah, we’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell/Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film”). In the ‘Camera’ vignette, we hear her pitch French actor Vincent Cassel an idea. We see the result in the video, an agitated Cassel giving the crew on location a torrid time, but nailing a difficult one-take scene.
Music, Fashion, Film is proof of how far you can go as a tastemaker if your interests are varied enough and you’re famous enough to call in favours. There’s no evident reason director David Cronenberg should be in the intro for ‘No One Lasts Forever’ except that Charli probably likes his work and could reach out to him. Maybe there’s just enough Velvet Underground in the music to justify John Cale on the album cover, but why Martin Scorsese? They’re there to tell us of Charli’s good taste. Her extended interview with DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s YouTube channel is filmed in inky black-and-white across a checkered table: a tribute to Jim Jarmusch’s conversation film Coffee and Cigarettes (2003). It makes perfect sense that Charli might admire Jarmusch, a filmmaker who’s also a musician, and someone with a rare ability to mix and match cool disparate art.
Over the end credits, we hear Charli chatting with her chief musical collaborators on the album, A.G. Cook and Finn Keane. “I could, like, come up with some melodies,” she says. This is followed by the three interrupting each other: “Do you want us to try some…”, “And then we can try and… “And then we can see if the concept of…”, “And then you might be, oh, this is what it’s all about.” The first time I heard it, it seemed like a throwaway. But when I returned to it, I was struck by how clever an ending it is for a scrappy, self-reflexive work about the artistic process. Just three friends making stuff together, chaos giving way to creation.
‘Music, Fashion, Film’ is on YouTube.
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