Pop star Chappell Roan has said she doesn’t care about chart performance, radio play or awards, but in the lead-up to the 2025 Grammys, she appealed to witches, wiccans and others with higher power to secure just one nomination for her: best recording package, awarded for album artwork. “It’s not televised, most people don’t know about it, but … this means a lot to me,” she said.
Pleading alongside her was Ramisha Sattar, Roan’s creative director. The design they submitted for Grammys consideration was a set of paper dolls Sattar conceptualised for the first-anniversary edition vinyl of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which can be slotted into the LP’s cardboard sleeve, cut to resemble parted stage curtains. “It feels like a little craft day when you’re putting them together – and that’s what so much of the album behind the scenes looks like for us,” says Sattar now, speaking on a video call.
Sattar works with Roan not only on her album packaging but also her merchandise, marketing, stage concepts and more. Creative directors like her are becoming increasingly vital as pop stars manage the demands to produce social media content, products, blockbuster stadium tours and visually distinct “eras” of music.
Kanye West may have established the blueprint with his collaboration with the late Virgil Abloh, while Ciarra Pardo worked with Rihanna for nearly a decade before becoming chief creative officer of the singer’s company Fenty Corp. Oliver El-Khatib grew rapper Drake into a brand, October’s Very Own, now synonymous with Toronto. Todd Tourso, Beyoncé’s long-time creative director, was instrumental in the career pivot of her 2014 “visual album”, making her videos just as hotly anticipated as her music. More recently, Imogene Strauss – who has partnered with Caroline Polachek, Solange and Clairo – worked with Charli xcx on Brat, collaborating on the now-iconic shade of green for the cover and stoking the online memes that helped to turn the album into a cultural moment.
Rosalía’s creative director and stylist is her elder sister, Pili Vila. “They always come to the conversation with a very strong idea of what the song is about,” says Nicolás Méndez, founder of the production company Canada, who has directed several of Rosalía’s videos. Pienso en tu Mirá, a song about toxic love, inspired a concept about vampires with Spanish imagery drawn from the sisters’ childhoods; TKN, about family, led to an idea for an unruly “herd of kids” with Rosalía as matriarch. “Once I have the concept, then it is just a matter of thinking around it, in every direction, and seeing what images come out,” says Méndez.
Sattar, meanwhile, is “just as much Chappell Roan as I am”, Roan has said. They started working together in 2022, after Roan came across Sattar’s work and sent her a message on Instagram. Sattar designed some merchandise, then worked as a wardrobe assistant for the videos for Casual and My Kink Is Karma before joining Roan’s team. Now she works closely with stylist Genesis Webb and set designer Maris Jones across all of Chappell Roan’s varied output, “making sure that there’s that through line … that makes it all feel like Chappell”.
The briefs can be varied, including sourcing items for shoots and matching colours and fabrics to individual songs, but what makes a design or concept “Chappell Roan” – as opposed to Sabrina Carpenter, say, or Olivia Rodrigo – “can’t really be condensed down to a one-pager,” says Sattar. “Sometimes we know exactly what we want, and sometimes the fun part is figuring it out.” The first step is often a mood board. “We have a lot of fun during that moment: ‘Let’s reference this vintage thing we found at a flea, and also our favourite movie’,” says Sattar.
The starting point for the charming lyric video for Good Luck, Babe! – which spent 14 weeks in the UK Top 5 – was imagining a teenager’s enthusiasm for Microsoft PowerPoint. “You’d add in these unnecessary transitions, and the colours almost hurt your eyes because you used every single one – that was kind of the vibe,” Sattar says. “Like, if someone made this on their laptop.”
At other times, the direction is suggested by lyrics. The video for Hot to Go! was inspired by its cheerleader-chant chorus and playful allusions to takeout food. The lyric “hurry up, it’s getting cold” invoked red and white, says Sattar. “We referenced a lot of old napkins, pizza boxes … [and] played into the diner aesthetic.” One early item of merch, a bandana showing a wand-wielding rabbit, was similarly inspired by a fan-favourite lyric from Red Wine Supernova. “It’s about making stuff that you know people are going to be excited about,” Sattar says. “They pick up on every little detail.”
Baz Halpin, chief executive and founder of production agency Silent House, agrees that a strong visual concept can help to foster loyalty and community among fans. When he began his career in the mid-90s, lighting was musicians’ chief means of making a statement on stage, “and video was really the realm of the very successful, wealthy performers”, he says. Today, “audiences are much more sophisticated”, with an inexhaustible demand for content.
Where details about stadium shows used to be tightly restricted, behind-the-scenes material and even setlists are now shared ahead of time, “just to feed that media machine”, Halpin says.
The process always starts with a conversation about what the artist is wanting to say. “It can be more than a concert – it can have a message, a narrative,” Halpin says, pointing to set designer Willie Williams’ work with U2, from the 1992 Zoo TV tour to 2023’s Achtung Baby Live at Sphere. “Any artist that is known for having a great visual presentation over multiple tours, will always have a director that they have worked with for decades.” Halpin namechecks Justin Timberlake as one performer who “loves the practical side” of putting together a stadium spectacle – but “most do not operate on that technical level, or want to”.
Halpin’s longest-running relationship is 20 years with Pink, who was inspired by seeing aerialists at a Cher concert to apply her own background in gymnastics to her shows. Over successive tours, Halpin has helped to develop the performance from a simple silks routine to the high-level aerial acrobatics that now define a Pink show.
The moments of a performance that resonate, however, can be unexpected. “Left Shark”, the much-memed backing dancer from Katy Perry’s Super Bowl spectacle, was “one of those happy accidents”, Halpin says. “If anything, I thought the singing palm trees would get more play.” But it all worked perfectly with Perry’s fun-filled style of the time: “Audiences can smell fakeness a miles away – it’s important that you’re always being true to who the artist is.”
The creative director’s job is to help them to convey that, Halpin adds. He may not be known by fans of Swift, Pink or Perry – just as Chappell Roan fans may not know Sattar. But she has still profoundly shaped the career of pop’s newest superstar, as recognised, albeit indirectly, by the Grammys. “We didn’t get the packaging nomination – but we got six other ones,” she says triumphantly.
