Great Outfits in Fashion History: The Creatively Coordinated Looks of Destiny's Child

This is peak early-2000s style, done three different ways.

Destiny’s Child at the 2000 Source Hip-Hop Music Awards in Pasadena.

There are perfectly good celebrity style moments, and then there are the looks that really stick with you, the ones you try desperately to recreate at home. In ‘Great Outfits in Fashion History,’ Fashionista editors are revisiting their all-time favorite lewks.

Getting dressed as a musical act with more than one significant member has long presented an interesting challenge. Some groups take what I call the early Sleater-Kinney approach, where each band member seemingly just dresses themselves individually with little attempt to coordinate their looks. On the extreme opposite end of the spectrum is the Lucius approach, where the leads dress exactly alike — down to makeup and hairstyle – to the point that they’re indistinguishable from one another.

Walking the line between the two is the obviously-coordinated-but-not-exactly-matching approach adopted by Destiny’s Child in their heyday. Whether Beyoncé Knowles, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams were on the red carpet or onstage, they almost never made public appearances together without carefully crafting a unified look. But it’s the high degree of coordination without perfectly matching that makes these early-2000s outfits so remarkable (and likely such a challenge from a stylist’s perspective).

Destiny’s Child at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards in New York City.

View the 8 images of this gallery on the original article

Sometimes nailing the look meant pairing very similar tops (in this case, crystal bikini tops) with different bottoms — shorts for Rowland, skort for Knowles, capris (!) for Williams — as at the 2000 Source Hip Hop Music Awards. Other times it meant opting for dresses in different colors, but made of similar textures and fabrics, as at the 2000 Billboard Music Awards. One of my favorite examples of this coordination came from the group’s appearance at the 2001 Soul Train Lady of Soul Awards, when they wore dresses in different cuts that all referenced the same watermelon pinks and greens, but in different iterations of lace and brocade.

Just in case you’re using this time to prep for the debut of your own girl group, we rounded up some of our favorite pieces of clothing that coordinate well without matching too perfectly. I look forward to seeing you and your crew at the top of the charts.