Among the things Sweden is known for are tech innovation and ABBA. For the past two years, while fashion has been buzzing about NFTs, the members of the band (median age 75), have been working on a revolutionary concept concert for their latest album, Voyage, with George Lucas’s company, Light & Magic (ILM).
This Voyage concert, which will be performed in residency a custom-built arena in London, is big, big news not only because ABBA, one of the best-selling acts of all time, had been dormant for 40 years until returning in 2021 with an album, also called Voyage, but because this newfangled concert will attempt to bridge the digital and physical worlds with light, sound, and “ABBAtars”—not holograms—using performance capture that’s combined with archival footage. The audience will hear songs recorded by the quartet and performed by avatars projected on an invisible screen and accompanied by a live band.
In many ways Voyage puts futuristic technology in service to nostalgia. The Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Agnetha Fältskog, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad who perform will be “de-aged” to look like their 1979 selves rather than their present ones. But this fetishization of youth only extends to beauty. The band will not be wearing the flared-leg jeans, clogs, or cat dresses they favored in the Me Decade. Bea Åkerlund, a fellow Swede, well-known for working with musicians, was engaged as the costume designer.
Åkerlund has been working on the project since 2019, which is when she first got a call from the Emmy Award winning director Johan Renck. “I’ve done some other big Swedish iconic brands and I thought, of course ABBA would be the ultimate Swedish icon pop stars to work for,” she said on a Zoom call. The first step was to research the band’s fashions over the years, but her aim was to interpret its aura rather than recreate past looks. “We wanted to make it modern, yet have the feel of the ABBA aesthetic, which is quite hard. So the thought process was that if ABBA never aged and if they were to go on tour now, what would they look like?”
For starters, no cat dresses are involved. Åkerlund retained the idea of an animal, but chose the phoenix as being representative of the band’s reemergence. “I chose Manish [Arora] because he does intensive beading, and I really wanted the opening costumes to be really elaborate…[and] super-embellished. There are thousands and thousands of Swarovski crystals mixed in with embroidery to accomplish that.”
Erevos Aether, Greek designers working out of London, are responsible for the band’s light-up “ABBAtron” costumes. “I thought that they understood the concept of the future, and they work a lot in plexi and neoprene, [which] are really good materials because you can dance [in them]. They allowed for another extra element besides just lighting up the costume.” Michael Schmidt, who once made a dress for Debbie Harry out of razor blades, and who has a way with metal mesh, was Åkerlund’s pick, using the material to make costumes “that felt disco, yet modern.” For the finale, Åkerlund says she wanted to make the band members “bigger than life, sort of like Greek gods.” Recalling that Dolce & Gabbana had worked on that theme before, she turned to them for elaborately embellished pieces. “They have the craftsmanship and they have the knowledge of what it is that I’m after.”
There are about 20 costume changes in Voyage, yet not one garment was fitted on Benny, Agnetha, Anna-Frid, or Björn. Åkerlund worked with body doubles. Sketches were approved by ABBA, and then the actual garments were scanned. ABBA performed the concert in green suits, and so it is their movement, and voices, the audience will enjoy. Because she wanted everything “to look as real as possible,” each finished garment was digitized to capture every physical detail. The band’s dancing shoes, for the record, are from platform specialist Terry de Havilland.
ABBA’s Voyage costumes are, to some extent, “an homage to the ’70s,” yet in many ways they are unconnected to chronology because ABBA as a cultural phenomenon is bigger than its own era. “I don’t think I know one person that doesn’t know an ABBA song or won’t dance when the music comes on,” Åkerlund says, adding that the band “represents everything in my childhood.” Music can create a shared, borderless, and intangible experience. Can digital fashion follow?