If you’ve ever wondered what inspires the looks in BTS’ videos, V is here to give you a bit of insight into how he pulls together his colorful outfits. In an interview with Weverse magazine, the 25 year-old member of the K-pop supergroup pulls back the curtain on which icons he looked to for his slick profile in the “Butter” visual.
“Well, there was Billy Joel,” V said, though he didn’t elaborate on what role the Piano Man played in his “Butter” profile. “When I shoot a music video, I think of a movie more than any one artist. And when I perform on stage, for some songs I think of the way movies like Reservoir Dogs look. For ‘Butter,’ I watched a lot of teen movies. And musicals. After that I randomly ended up seeing a video on YouTube of some scenes from an old teen movie Johnny Depp did [Cry-Baby]. The image I got from that was really intense. That’s the look I used in ‘Butter.’”
The 1990 teen musical/rom-com written and directed by provocateur John Waters starred Depp as a 1950s-era teen rebel “Cry-Baby” Wade Walker, whose iconic look includes a slicked-back greaser pompadour with a hanging forelock, leather motorcycle jacket, jeans and white T-shirt. In fact, V said that “Butter” felt like a teen musical to him and that he “really, really tried to shoot the part in the elevator so it would feel like a teen movie.”
In fact, listening to V describe what he finds so charming about teen movies, it totally makes sense why they appeal to him. The singer said he appreciates their youthfulness and mix of “emotion, energy and a completely different and peculiar mood that everyone necessarily experiences at that age. If you watch teen movies, they’re overflowing with energy and full of sunny emotion, but behind it all they’re not as bright as they seem. They are really bright, but the color itself almost feels like some kind of filter.”
In the interview V also talks about doing a deep-dive into the Louis Armstrong catalog on vinyl lately, how he had to practice “a lot” to hit some uncharacteristic high notes on “Dynamite” and the strength he draws from the group’s dedicated ARMY.
