The 50 Most Stylish Men in Music

We’ve crunched the numbers, and in the history of one man looking at another man and thinking, Damn, I wish I could dress like that, 71.8 percent of the time, the object of envy has been a musician. Musicians are simply more stylish than the rest of us. The scientific explanation is that their unique ability to conjure emotions and generate indelible memories by literally vibrating the air around them translates remarkably well into fashion, where a similar magic trick is being performed but for the eye rather than the ear. There’s something else, though: Music, more than most sources of the kind of fame and fortune that thrust a man into the public eye, is intensely personal. It begins alone in a bedroom with a drum machine or a laptop or a guitar or a scratch pad of cast-off couplets waiting to be assembled into a lyric. And the currency of fashion, as the 50 men on this list attest, is authentic self-expression.