There’s a changing of the guard in fashion and culture. Gen Z creators are pushing the conversation forward in ways both awe-inspiring and audacious. Our latest project, Youthquake, invites you to discover how these artists, musicians, actors, designers, and models are radically reimagining the future.
“Is love going to be my enemy?” That’s the central question that singer and multi-instrumentalist Jake Wesley Rogers sought to answer on his new EP Pluto, a collection of ballads powered by his soaring melodies, empathetic vocals, and lyrics that cut bone deep. He first posed this question to himself a few years ago during a guided walking tour in Paris focused on the life of Oscar Wilde. “There was a part of the tour where the guide said, ‘If there was an enemy in the story of Oscar Wilde, it was his lover Bosie’,” Rogers explains over the phone from his childhood bedroom in Springfield, Missouri, referencing the famed writer’s famously torrid love affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas. “It sent me on this spiral of what it means to love somebody,” Rogers continues. “And at the same time, I was stepping into myself and my sound—wanting to embrace who I was as a human being, as an artist, as a storyteller, as a lover.”
The rising 25-year-old Nashville–based performer has had quite the year. His six-song exploration of love in its many forms, from self-love to romantic to familial, has not only garnered millions of streams with tracks like anthem “Middle of Love” and ballad “Weddings and Funerals,” but caught the attention of Elton John, who interviewed Rogers on his Apple 1 Radio show Rocket Hour over the summer, as well Ben Platt, who hand-picked Rogers to join him on tour, kicking off next month.
Having grown up in the Ozarks, Rogers is no stranger to standing out. “Being in a place where being different isn’t necessarily celebrated, it pushed me to be more different,” he says. He learned to play guitar at 6 and began training piano and classical singing at 12. “I was always performing as a kid, I loved theater, I loved being on stage, but it was in middle school that I started writing songs. I want to write because I want to do what my heroes were doing at the time, like Lady Gaga and Adele, that was my middle school playlist. These fierce, eclectic, loud, beautiful voices.” Of all of these voices, Rogers looked up to Lady Gaga most. “She was my entrance into what it could look like to be a glam pop star, but still have the integrity of an artist, writer, and performer,” he continues. “I didn’t really grow up listening to Elton, Queen, or Bowie—it’s been more recently that I started to go further back.” Of course, in following the blueprint set forth by his glam rock heroes, a distinct aesthetic vision was and remains a vital part of the equation.
Although Roger’s natural charisma and electric musicality is arresting on its own, there’s no denying that his style, from his dazzling stage-wear to his bold nail art, ups the ante on his must-follow-on-TikTok status. It doesn’t hurt that he bears a striking resemblance to one of his heroes, David Bowie, with his statuesque frame, chiseled bone structure, and Ziggy red crop either. “From a very young age, my mom was taking me thrifting. In high school, I was all about vintage clothes and pushing the limits for being a male-presenting person in Missouri,” he explains of cultivating his exaggerated, decade-spanning sense of style from a young age. But even though Rogers has always had a flair for fashion statements, rising the ranks as a performer has upped the ante. “The past year or two in music has given me the confidence and ability to wear a lot of things that I’ve wanted to wear—the kind of stuff where if I was 12 and saw Gaga wearing it I’d be like, Wow,” he says of moments such as his recent appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden wearing a shimmering jumpsuit with a ruffled tulle cape and purple crescent moon eyewear. Rogers also dazzled on Late Night With Seth Meyers dressed as a “beautiful garden” and sporting a three-piece ivory shorts suit with a larger-than-life bow tie and a cascade of boa-like strings of yellow and orange marigolds. “As a performer, putting on a costume feels like a superhero uniform,” Rogers says. “You’re becoming this character that’s basically the superhero of yourself—and that’s really what I look to fashion for.”
Only adding to the drama are his high-impact makeup looks, which often find him bleaching his brows, encasing his gaze in glitter and Rainbow Brite color, or painting his lips in gleaming metallic pigments. “When I wear makeup, I always want there to be a pop of something, like a bold eye or lip, and the rest is pretty bare,” Rogers says. “It feels more like rock ’n’ roll in that way.” His hair, a shock of copper accented by a set of face-framing platinum streaks, is very much a visual marker of his current era. “There’s something about red that I just fell in love with, and it really helped me become the artist that I wanted to be,” he explains of dyeing his natural dirty blonde an atomic orange. “When I did the music for my song “Pluto,” I was really inspired by Bowie’s Ziggy phase…And also shoutout to Ginger Spice, she was the main inspiration.”
The cherry on top of Rogers’s fully realized looks is often a striking manicure. Think: Punkish chipped black nails or sharp stiletto talons on any given day. It’s a statement of self-expression that holds a deeper meaning to him. “I started painting my nails a few years ago, and for me, it was dipping a toe into the water to explore a ‘feminine’ thing,” he says. “It felt like this practice in being myself on the outside.” Needless to say, he’s happy to see the rapid rise of men’s nail art over the past few years, and appreciates the sea change it signals. “Now everyone and their dog paints their nails,” he says and then laughs. “It’s beautiful.”
On the older end of Gen Z, Rogers has witnessed a seismic shift in culture since his adolescence. He’s proud of what he and his peers stand for, and how they’ve challenged the status quo across the board. “We don’t wish to continue beliefs and institutions that, frankly, don’t fucking work or serve anybody anymore,” he says. “We wish to destroy them, but do so in a newfound philosophical and spiritual and better way. That’s something I love because I feel like it was a huge bridge of a generation, especially with tech, social media, and access.” Then, of course, there’s the joy and hope his generation supplies—even in the face of having had precious years upended by the global pandemic. “There’s just so much refreshing creativity, especially on TikTok, and I’m amazed by the breadth of people doing super creative or funny things,” Rogers says. “We’ve been handed a lot of not-so-beautiful lemons, and we were able to make a ginger lemon kombucha—and we’re healing our guts.”
With a banner year behind him, a major tour ahead of him, and new music ready for takeoff, Rogers is bringing great excitement and confidence into 2022. “As a creator aligning with the art I’m supposed to make, and step into, and be, I think it’s going to be my most favorite year so far,” he says. “We’re going to build this rocket ship while we’re flying!”