No offense to Dsquared2's Dean and Dan Caten, but we've been taking our style cues from another set of Canadian twins lately: Indie darlings-turned-pop tour de force Tegan and Sara, identical twin sisters from Calgary. And while raiding the closets of our female counterparts isn't our usual m.o., just look at their clothes! Exhibit A: Their music video for "Boyfriend," which shows off some drool-worthy vintage tees paired with bomber and leather jackets.
We caught up with the sisters ahead of the release of their eighth studio album, June's Love You to Death, to talk about the impetus for their style, their music, and the many levels of crossover between men and lesbians.
It's a big moment right now for women's looks influencing how men dress—there's Phoebe Philo, Kristen Stewart, Eunice Lee, you guys. You always seem to have the coolest shoes, the coolest hair, the coolest clothes.
Sara: It's funny that you say women influencing men, because Tegan and I have always taken a lot of our cues from menswear.
Tegan: We say it in our style sheets: "You should be bringing us more structured clothing. We like male fashion."
Sara: We're always much more interested in dressing like boys—whatever that means in 2016. But I've always been much more interested in what's going on in men's fashion and what's happening on the men's runways, looking for ways to be androgynous and sort of play with the ideas of gender. When I see men playing with more feminine silhouettes or more feminine ideas—even just the layering and the longer shirts and the longer jackets, things that almost start to look like skirts or dresses—it's weird, because I'm like, "Maybe I want to do that! Oh, is Kanye gonna wear a skirt? I can wear a skirt!"
The look in the "Boyfriend" video runs parallel to a lot of the current trends in menswear.
Tegan: Before we shot the "Boyfriend" video we had a huge production meeting about clothes.
Sara: We were talking about sort of flipping the silhouettes from the last album cycle, which [our stylist] Turner referred to as "Tank Girl"—really tight pants, big clunky boots with oversize shirts, or a button-up with a leather jacket. We talked about purposely trying to reverse that. Having a longer jacket or a thin, more streamlined shoe on the bottom.
Tegan: Matching blazers or more fitted, structured jackets with ripped-up T-shirts.
Sara: Instead of it being tight pants, it's more of a slim cut. No matter if it's dress pants or a suit pant or whatever it is, not just having skin-tight jeans.
Tegan: Sometimes you can get caught in your own little style bubble. I kept being like, "You guys are sure the tapered pants with the Chelsea boot is not weird?" Because I live in skinny jeans.
Sara: We're having all these conversations about changing silhouettes, which I find hilarious because in the past we would just dump a drawer from the dresser into our suitcase before a tour and hope for the best.
Did you think at the start of your careers you would ever be discussing silhouettes?
Sara: No. To be completely honest, I had spent much of my life having a complicated relationship with clothing and with my body and my gender because I felt like such a boy. And I wanted to be a boy. I hated all this shit girls did. I hated that people would get up two hours before school to do their hair and makeup. I felt so envious of my guy friends who would wake up, throw their clothes on, brush their teeth, and drive to school. I had long hair down to the middle of my back, and when I graduated from twelfth grade, I went straight to the hair salon and shaved my head, bleached my hair. I started dressing the way I wanted. Though sometimes I cringe at some of the early decisions we made—you know, some of the haircuts and stylings.
Tegan: We had some pretty hilarious looks. The asymmetrical haircuts and the mullets and this and that.
Sara: But I also can go back really quickly into that feeling of freedom. It feels good to me sometimes [now] to be really feminine and to go to a shoot and get super glammed up. But I don't think I would have been able to arrive at this place if I hadn't gone through that stage where I was thumbing my nose at the whole idea of femininity and stylists and clothes. If you had said to me at 22, "What is your silhouette going to be for this album cycle?" I would have been like, "Go fuck yourself, that's my silhouette."
I'm happy you guys brought up your hair, because the evolution of your hairstyles over the years is downright fascinating, and I always notice that when you two wear a new hairstyle, guys wear it a year later. The quiff and pompadour looks especially.
Tegan: There's this joke in the lesbian community about how everyone always says they'd like to have Justin Bieber's haircut. But actually, Justin Bieber always has the haircut that lesbians have been sporting for a year.
Do you have any advice on how to obtain such enviable hair?
Sara: I tend to take my cues from what's happening in menswear. I grew my hair out over the last year and a half because I've wanted it to look like Harry Styles' hair. I wasn't looking at someone like Alexa Chung and saying, "Alexa's looking great, I'm going to get her hair." I'm looking at men and saying, "Oh, I like Harry's hair, it looks great."
Which is ironic, because I see you both with longer hair right now and my thought is, "Hmm, do I want to grow out my hair?"
Tegan : Sara and I always say that we're not just lesbians. We are lesbians, but there's always been something about Sara and I where there's a certain kind of straight girl who's really into us. Or there's a certain type of straight guy that we're really into. And of course now in 2016 it's awesome, because everyone's talking about gender fluidity and the spectrum—and even though we can look really feminine and can embrace that part of ourselves effortlessly, the truth is that even at our most feminine, there's something masculine about the way we wear clothes and the way we hold ourselves. So it doesn't ever shock or surprise me to see crossover between straight men and lesbians.
I would say the the same thing goes for your music. With "Boyfriend" especially I feel like I've been there; I've been really into a girl who had a boyfriend, and plenty of other guys have too. But if I'm being totally honest, I did have this moment of pause: Is my relating to this song, as a straight guy, actually just me taking ownership of something that's not for me? Or does it just further prove that we're all looking for the same thing in a relationship?
Tegan: Absolutely we are! And that's what is so hilarious—the music I'm obsessed with, like Depeche Mode or Bruce Springsteen or Tom Petty, I've never been like, "I don't really relate to them because they're straight men." That doesn't make any sense.
Sara: One of the things from an industry perspective and from an art perspective that has always frustrated me is that no straight person is asked, "So this is a very hetero-normative song, how do you expect anyone else to relate to it?" As a queer person, I've never thought to myself, "How will I ever relate to the new Beyoncé song? Or the new National song? It's just so straight."
Tegan: As a woman and as a gay artist, for whatever reason, people are constantly saying, "Oh, that's probably not for me then." Or, "They're gay and they're women, so I won't relate if I'm a guy." And it's like, we have more in common with you than we have with anyone else.
Sara: When we're talking about gay and straight, and when we're talking about love, love is love. We've all been there. We've all had the same fucking relationships. We all think our love is special—it's not. These are such simple things. We've spent seventeen years being like, "We're just like you," and now it's like we've finally hit that level where, yes, as a straight man you can go, "Yeah, I've totally wanted to be somebody's boyfriend, I really get this." Of course you get it! It's about you! It's about us!
I'll admit that did go through my head: "Is it surprising to you that straight guys relate to your music?" And then I realized that's a stupid fucking question.
Tegan: It is a stupid fucking question, but it's a question that's really important to ask. It's an idea that I hope will continue to evolve. It doesn't matter if you're a guy or a girl. Of course you relate! No, maybe you weren't raised to believe that as a man you can relate to me as a woman singing about me with another woman. But it's changing.
You guys are now at a point where you're music is influencing some of the biggest names in music. In your recent BuzzFeed profile, Jack Antonoff, who regularly works with artists like Taylor Swift and Sia, mentions how many other artists were influenced by your last record, Heartthrob**. Is it surreal to read something like that?**
Tegan: We actually performed "Closer" with Taylor at Staples Center and she said onstage, "This isn't just a band where I like one song. Heartthrob was my record." Katy Perry was also very vocal about supporting our abilities, and I really appreciated that.
Sara: I didn't just feel excited, I felt fucking grateful. I sort of had this opposite experience in the first 10 years of our career. In indie rock, I felt like we were outsiders. Every once in awhile, something like the White Stripes covering "Walking With a Ghost" would happen and I would be like, "Maybe we're not as big of losers as I thought," but nobody ever said we were the cool band.
Tegan: I don't like to talk shit on where we came from, but the indie-rock community, which was much more male-dominated, just tended to give us less props. I'm not sure what that was about. They would come up after festivals, but it was to say, like, "We love Chris Walla production."
Sara: I was used to getting bad reviews and us not being on people's top year-end lists. It's stupid to care about, but I did. Then all of a sudden we made a pop record and everyone was so nice! I was embarrassed to need it so much, but I really did want to know that we were influencing people or that people liked what we were doing.
Tegan: I took it as a compliment, but I also took it as, "Okay, we need to stay ahead of the curve." If everything is going to start to sound like that, then we need to make sure we're continuing to challenge ourselves. When we went in to do Love You to Death, we were like, "Let's do stuff we haven't done before."
Sara: As much as we wanted to be liked, or as much as we wanted more success, we also wanted to do it our way. It doesn't feel like we traded in anything.