Art & Creativity Quote by Nick Rhodes

Style here is less about clothing than about power: the ability to announce yourself before you’ve even played a note. Nick Rhodes frames the 1970s not as a nostalgic playlist but as a training ground where image and sound were fused into a single statement. Glam rock’s glittered excess and punk’s ripped-up refusal look like opposites, yet he treats them as a shared “stylish movement” because both understood the same rule: in a crowded culture, aesthetics are strategy.

The line “very important to us” signals something defensive and proud at once. It anticipates the evergreen dismissal of style as superficial, especially for bands like Duran Duran who later got tagged as glossy or “manufactured.” Rhodes is quietly rewriting that critique: style isn’t the packaging; it’s part of the art’s meaning. In the wake of glam and punk, to ignore presentation would be to miss the point. Bowie didn’t become Bowie by sounding different alone; he looked like a new species. The Sex Pistols didn’t just play fast; they wore antagonism.

Rhodes also smuggles in a generational claim. Growing up in the ’70s meant learning that identity could be constructed, performed, weaponized. That idea becomes the blueprint for the New Romantic era: synthesis over sincerity, pose as a form of honesty, artifice as a way to tell the truth about desire and ambition. In that context, “style” reads like a survival skill - and a manifesto.