Much like one of her signature songs, Avril Lavigne always wanted her style to be anything but ordinary.
After more than 20 years in the music industry, the 39-year-old Canadian singer has shaped a career and image uniquely her own. As Lavigne recalled in her rETrospective, it was that way from the start, down to the bag of personal accessories she brought along to her first photo shoots.
“I just wanted to be comfortable. I didn’t want to dress like ordinary or, you know, too plain,” she tells360aproko of her trend-setting personal style. “I was definitely in touch with my sportier, more tomboy side, so I was wearing a lot of, like, kind of skateboarding clothes and hoodies and baggy pants.”
While she acknowledged it all wasn’t quite what her parents preferred her to wear, the fans felt differently. “I remember playing my first concert at a little club and looking out the window and seeing fans lined up down the street all dressed like me — tank top, necktie, straight hair, black eyes — and I was just like, I had to do a double take like, ‘Wait, what is going on here?'”
For her earliest photo shoots, Lavigne made sure those trademark accessories were within reach. “I would show up to a photo shoot with a book bag with all my spiked bracelets and ties and a couple shirts and they definitely wanted me to wear the clothes that they had there,” she recalled. “First album, I was like, ‘I’m not wearing pink and a blouse… Please, I don’t want to wear that,’ so it was a bit of a fight, but some people were cool about it, so I would just take my book bag, dump it on the floor, and just be like, ‘But see, I came with this stuff,’ but that’s not how it works. You have to wear these clothes, but there was always a happy medium.”
Despite any outside efforts, Lavigne’s unique punk look was here to stay and has come to epitomize her career. Not matter its various forms, Lavigne’s fans have remained loyal to the sk8er girl vibe.
“Over the years, it was really cool to see as my style changed or whatever my vibe was — if I had pink in my hair like in the ‘Girlfriend’ video, I would show up with the different album cycles and do these tours and then see a lot of the audience dressed like that and that album cycle,” she acknowledges, “and they still do.”
When the eight-time GRAMMY nominee kicks off her Greatest Hits tour on May 22 in Vancouver, she’ll come face to face with her fans once again, serenading them with beloved singles like “Complicated,” “Girlfriend” and “Sk8er Boi.”
“The whole set list is singles, which to be honest, that’s a place that I strived to be at, especially on my first album because I only had, like, three singles,” she recalled. “From day one, I wanted to be able to have my whole show to be all singles and now I have that and I’m very proud of that.”
