More than just an ensemble of fabrics that we wear out of necessity, clothes have a far deeper significance. Not only do they act as an extension of our personalities and a kind of armour for the outside world, but they are often imbued with strong emotions and important memories, too – something that Griff knows all too well.
Kicking off our new ‘Fashioning Myself’ video series with a stylish bang, the 23-year-old singer-songwriter took ELLE UK on a whistle-stop tour of some of the most memorable looks she’s worn over the years – some made by her, some courtesy of her favourite designers, and all transported from her childhood bedroom to a suite at London’s NoMad Hotel for the occasion.
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The pop prodigy has only been on the scene for a few years – Griff released her debut single in 2019 and won the BRITs Rising Star award in 2021 – but she’s amassed quite the fashion archive already. Her wardrobe includes pieces by Chopova Lowena, Susan Fang, and her ‘number one favourite designer’, Simone Rocha. ‘Every time I wear Simone I feel like a princess,’ she told ELLE UK. ‘I think you can tell as a female when a female has designed clothes, and I think all women put on Simone Rocha and feel very empowered, very confident and very expensive.’
Griff wears Simone Rocha to the ELLE Style Awards in 2023.
It’s all the more impressive, then, that despite having such big-name brands at her disposal, Griff has opted to make her own clothes for some of the biggest moments of her career so far. For her first show at Hoxton Hall, for example, the singer wore a home-made pyjama-style satin two piece: ‘I was super nervous, I’d just come out of Sixth Form’, she recalls. And though her second-ever live performance was significantly more high-profile – at the 2021 BRITs, no less – Griff decided she wanted to craft something of her own for that, too.
Griff wears a dress of her own design at the 2021 BRITs.
‘I basically was like, I feel like I want to make something for this moment because it’s fun memorabilia and it’s a fun challenge,’ she explained, while showing off the deconstructed lilac dress she wore on-stage. ‘When I’m performing, I always need to be able to move and be free and jump and twirl and not be too serious, so it had to just be practical in that sense.’
The same idea applied to what has arguably been the most high-profile gig of her life so far: opening for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in London. ‘I accidentally bumped into Taylor at a Kendrick Lamar concert,’ Griff told ELLE UK, before going on to explain how the collaboration came about in the first place. ‘It was insane,’ she says.
Inspired by her favourite song from The Tortured Poets Department, ‘But Daddy I Love Him’, Griff designed and hand-made the dress she wore for her Wembley debut – though, she admits, she has a real ‘love-hate’ relationship with it: ‘I didn’t have loads of time to do the usual process of draw, sketch, rub it out… I was kind of being a bit irrational, making quick decisions. I got half-way through making it, I posted it online, and then someone commented “ahh so cute, it looks like Elsa from Frozen” and from that point on I’ve never been able to look at it the same.’
From her Taylor Swift tour dress regrets and the ‘night-before freak-outs’ that led to some of her most memorable looks, to the outfit so ‘big’ and ‘impractical’ that she had to apologise to Tems, watch Griff’s ‘Fashioning Myself’ video at the top of this article.
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