Chapter 3 Music as Key-Influencer of Fashion Trends Jochen Strähle and Jennifer Rödel Abstract Aim of this paper is to provide an understanding to which extent music and fashion interdepend and interact referring to the music and fashion trend development, focusing the period from 1950 till today. It further helps the reader to gain an insight if the technology provided influences the development and the access of music and fashion in future. The research for this paper required the use of secondary sources including library and online research. The goal was to gather information about the former and current development of music and fashion. These methods were the best alternatives of secondary sources as they provided trusted results thus enhancing the accuracy of the data being collected. But however they were also limited since mainly data for the fashion and music development of the noughties were limited. This is explainable by the key finding that the development of this time is not as distinct as the one of the former times, when a fashion trend came along with a new music genre or hit, which implies that fashion and music correlate to a certain extent, but characterized by a reactivation of the music and fashion trends of previous times without any new inventions. Keywords Music Á Fashion Á Music history 3.1 Introduction Fashion is known to develop in cycles (Calefato 2001). The stereotypical approach is that what is trendy in one season may well be deemed and outdated the next. It could be argued that music and its development is similar (Sinnreich and Gluck 2005). The aim of this research paper is to provide an understanding to which extent music and fashion interdepend and interact referring to the music and fashion trend development, focusing the period from 1950 till today. It should further help the reader to gain an insight if the technology provided influences the development and J. Strähle Á J. Rödel (&) School of Textiles and Design, Reutlingen University, Reutlingen, Germany e-mail: Jennifer-r10@gmx.de © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 J. Strähle (ed.), Fashion & Music, Springer Series in Fashion Business, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-5637-6_3 31