At the 23rd Annual #PopConference (PopCon 2025), held at USC Thornton School of Music on Friday, March 14, 2025, I curated and moderated a multidisciplinary panel titled Dressed to Thrill: Tracing the Cultural Impact of Prince’s Iconic Fashion and Style. As Prince’s influence on popular culture continues to resonate across generations, this panel offered new frameworks for understanding how his revolutionary fashion choices shaped and continue to shape visual culture, gender expression, and identity politics in popular music.

The panel featured an international roster of speakers:

• Professor Kirsty Fairclough (Manchester Metropolitan University)
  In “Style as Legacy: Examining Prince’s Influence on Beyoncé’s Fashion and Artistic Expression,” Fairclough examined the stylistic and cultural lineage connecting Beyoncé and Prince, revealing how Beyoncé’s fashion both introduces and reinterprets Prince’s iconic aesthetic for a new generation.
• Casci Ritchie (Northumbria University)
  In”Embodied Intimacy: Studying Prince’s Dressed Moving Body on Screen,” Ritchie introduced “embodied intimacy” as a theoretical lens to analyze the audience’s sensory and emotional response to Prince’s clothed, moving body, using the performance of “Hot Thing” from Sign o’ the Times Live (1987) as a case study.
• Robin Shumays (Independent Scholar)
  In “Bedlah Bedlam: An Exploration of Orientalist Fantasy and Fashion via the Lens of Prince Rogers Nelson,” Shumays explored how Prince’s early 1990s fashion was influenced by Middle Eastern belly dance aesthetics through his relationship with Mayté Garcia.
• Karen Turman (Harvard University)
  In “‘A Long Fur Coat of Mink’: Semiotics of the Fur Coat in Sheila E.’s ‘The Glamorous Life’,” Turman analyzed Sheila E.’s mink coat in the “The Glamorous Life” video as a complex symbol of wealth, race, class, sex, and environmental politics.

Together, these presentations illuminated how Prince’s fashion legacy transcends mere aesthetics to interrogate broader conversations about culture, identity, and artistic influence.