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Tove Lo performs Say It with Flume at the 2016 ARIAs
Credit: Getty Images
Robbie Williams has worn the same Gucci printed suit multiple times while touring his album The Heavy Entertainment Show around the world, I tell Tove Lo. She smiles and nods. Australian musician Ben Lee has worn his bright yellow suit on the cover of his album, during an interview on The Project and to the ARIAs. The thing is, people never question this, some don’t even notice and neither they should. They are way more interested in listening to what Williams and Lee have to say. “If I would have shown up to the ARIAs in something I had worn to four other awards shows, it would have been like, ‘Oh come on,’ Lo says. “There’s always going to be focus on how women dress and there’s always going to be opinions about how I look and I just can’t let it get to me.”
The critically acclaimed, multi-platinum Swedish artist is of course referring to the controversy surrounding the dress she wore to the Australia Record Industry Awards on November 23. “It’s a bold dress, I get it. I’ve worn more extreme things though,” she says. The dress though, with a uterus hand-stitched to the front of it, was very strategic in typifying the frank attitude she has towards sexuality and feminism, much like her new album, Lady Wood. “[The designer] was like, ‘What about a uterus on the dress?’ and I was just like, ‘Fuck yes’ because it plays back to the album title so it fits.”
Tove Lo’s ARIAs dress
Credit: Instagram @tovelo
Since the 2014 career-defining global hit Habits (Stay High), Lo has passed the one billion streams mark with tracks like Talking Body, Close (with Nick Jonas), Fun (with Coldplay), Freak of Nature (with Broods), the ARIA award winning Say It with Flume and current track Cool Girl. Lady Wood though is one of the more rowdy female empowerment kind of music offerings. “I want you to feel like you can be who you are and you don’t need to apologise for it,” she says. “It doesn’t mean you have to be this perfect human who never does anything wrong or only fucks up when things are really bad. Men and women can behave exactly the same and a man is just being a man but a woman has to have a million excuses for the same behaviour. I’ve just never been ok with the social codes I was handed as a woman in this world. It’s about being proud of who you are even if you’re a little bit messy.”
Watch the full interview here.
Lady Wood is out now.
