Fashion Bandspace: AH+ Touts The XX and These New Puritans

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It's almost impossible these days to extricate the intertwined-ness of the fashion and music worlds—and we're not just talking about what Rihanna or Lady Gaga's stylists have picked for them to wear this week.

The new spring-summer issue of Arena Homme+ touts The XX and These New Puritans as the most stylistically modern bands—collectives that follow in a long line, both within and without the music industry, that influence entire aesthetics and lifestyles, both visual and aural—fashion bands in the purest, most organic sense of the term:

They are, though, very now, to the extent that for all their affinity with the past, and the way rock moved so swiftly and inexorably from Elvis to, say, Missy Elliott, from The Shadows to Burial, and even though they would not have looked out of place supporting the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, Neu!, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, This Heat, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, 808 State, PAvement, Aphex Twin, Low, they absolutely could only exist after hip hop and its various abstract electro-based UK transmutations. They could only exist post-vinyl, post-CD, post-iPod, post-Google, post-indie, post-grunge, post-Britpop, post-Tricky, post-Britney, post-Timbaland.

· Arena Homme+ [Facebook]
· These New Puritans [Official Site]
· The XX [Official Site]