This New Music Video Is a Futuristic Cyborg Fashion Fantasy

Barcelona-based artist Arca’s music videos have long incorporated bionic-looking limbs and animé-like warrior princess fashion. She recycled many of the same pieces from her “Reverie” video from three years ago--like the custom bullfighter’s jacket and the stilt-like prosthetics--in her site-specific, multi-day performance at New York City arts venue The Shed last year (of those towering mechanical legs, she told Vogue after one of the performances she wants to wear them). The Shed show was perhaps the finest showcase of her fashion trajectory yet, and Arca likened her style persona in those performances (which were styled by Natacha Voranger) to the sci-fi character Aeon Flux. “She has a lot of skin exposed and she’s going through a battlefield,” she described.

Her futuristic sense of style reaches new heights in her new video for “Nonbinary,” the first single from her forthcoming album KiCK i. There’s moments that recall the Chris Cunningham-directed Björk video for “All Is Full of Love,” wherein the Icelandic singer is a robot being assembled. In Arca’s case, though, she’s pregnant (and yet again wearing her beloved mechanical legs) in a barely-there white strappy outfit as androids surround her on an operating room table.

Next, she’s a modern day Birth of Venus, crouching in a clam shell in a pair of white marabou heels and one white satin glove with roses strewn about her body. At the end of the futuristic film, she seems to be in a heated argument with herself (though you can only see the back of her interlocutor’s head) and is surrounded by flames. The Arca that you can see, however, is wearing little more than a pair of triangular shoulder pads and some pasties. It’s an uncanny moment that underlies the song’s ode to multiplicity—at the end of the song she sings, “I can be friendly or I can be fake… What a treat/it is to be/nonbinary/ma chérie,” which she finishes off with a literal “tee hee hee” laugh at the end. It’s a double fashion moment that proves that Arca’s style can be many things at once: cyborgian, strange, and always compelling.