The Story Behind M.I.A.’s Flower Suit in Her New Video With Travis Scott

Earlier this week, Travis Scott announced his upcoming song, “Franchise,” with an Instagram snap of the single’s artwork: an arresting painting by George Condo. The accompanying video, which dropped earlier today, has equally surprising visuals, from the opening scenes lifted from The Last Dance to clips of M.I.A. dancing in an open, sun-dappled field. Most of the video is filmed in Jordan’s Chicago mansion, but those nature scenes (filmed across the pond in Rye, England) are unexpected—even more so when M.I.A. suddenly appears in a suit made of fresh flowers.Think of it as the Midsommar dress lightened up by about 30 pounds. As the artist dances in the suit and finds herself surrounded by a herd of sheep, the effect is of an impossibly light, buoyant cloud of blooms around her body. Needless to say, it was hardly your standard DIY project: Imruh Asha, M.I.A.’s stylist, asked London-based florist and set designer Emily Davies of Athlyn to create something “maximalist, almost trippy,” as Davies put it. “We talked a lot about surreal, mystical references, and about the idea of being ‘rooted’ in nature, but not necessarily in reality,” she adds.The otherworldly results came together faster than you’d think: Asha DM’d Davies on a Sunday, and by Tuesday morning she was at the flower market by 4:00 a.m., dedicating the rest of the day and night in her studio to assembling the “suit.” Here, she shares a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes process and outtakes from her day on set.Photo: Courtesy of Emily DaviesPhoto: Courtesy of Emily Davies“The look itself is pretty technically complex,” she says. “There are eight distinct parts to the suit, which I built on chicken wire and brought together with cable ties.” Still, the bigger challenge was choosing flowers that are “resilient enough to last out of water, but also light enough to be worn on the body and move with it in a really fluid way,” she explains. “My aim was to make the work look like an organic form—it needed to look like it had sprung from the earth. I created a neutral base with limonium [also known as sea lavender], chamelaucium, and heather, and then added gerberas, chrysanthemum and leucadendron to introduce these almost acid licks of color.”The suit had to be built directly onto M.I.A.’s body during the shoot, a process that should have taken 30 minutes, “but we had less than ten!” Davies says. “The sun was setting, so we needed to hustle to get the magic ‘golden hour’ shots. We were manically sticking flowers into the suit whilst she had it on, and we had to make our way through hundreds of sheep to adjust the piece between takes.” Those sheep ended up solving the problem of what Davies might do with the flowers at the end of the night: “Flowers would fall off as she was dancing, and then the sheep started eating the flowers right off her while she was performing,” she says. (Consider it true “zero-waste” fashion.) “Take after take, it was very slowly disintegrating off her body. That’s the thing about working with flowers—you’re working with live material. It’s ephemeral and it’s fleeting, and everything is about the moment.”This was Davies’s first music video and first foray into creating “fashion” out of flowers, but given the buzz M.I.A.’s look is getting, you’ll no doubt see more of her work soon. Inquiring minds can follow her Instagram for more botanical inspiration, while Londoners should look into purchasing flowers on her site, athlyn.co.Photo: Courtesy of Emily Davies,
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