LA Weekly

“You need a different tie,” he instructs one.

“Try this shirt instead,” he tells another.

After about an hour and a half, and the addition of some hair-care product, OK Go are finally photo-ready, dressed in clashing stripes, polka dots and paisley. They’re a boy band like the Temptations were a boy band, but with the energy of the Monkees. They have style but look authentic and fresh — it’s hard to imagine them in anything like the formulaic heartthrob fashions of the more recent Backstreet Boys variety.

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Kreiling is proud and exhausted as we make our way up into the Houdini séance room. He kind of fell into this work — the accidental stylist. A Chicago native, he started off doing wearable art, or what he calls “sculptural crazy fashion.” He went to college with bassist Nordwind, though Kulash remembers first meeting Kreiling dancing on a pool table at a party. When OK Go signed with Capitol and moved to L.A., they looked to Kreiling for help.

“I’ve done them lots of fashion favors,” laughs Kreiling. “In the beginning, being a new band, it’s hard to establish yourself unless you’re very stylish. Otherwise, it’s hard for marketability. Teenage girls won’t like you unless you look hot, or if you’re just, like, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

There, he’s said it. Most people don’t want to admit it, because it sounds shallow or superficial, but the fashion and style of a band have always been important to the success of that band. From the Temptations in the ’50s, with their matching suits, to the long, hair-sprayed locks of ’80s metal bands, having a “look” has always been important. Even with grunge in the early ’90s, not having a style became a style.

These days, music and fashion are so bound in a reciprocal swap of art form that many bands are taking style to a new level.

Of course, OK Go’s style didn’t start out on a high plane. Odds are you saw them dancing on treadmills in that music video on YouTube. (see end of story for video)

“Fifteen to 20 million people saw us on YouTube,” says Kulash, “but I don’t mistake that for a giant fan base or think that means we were universally liked. The thing that was cool about it was it wasn’t cool. It was fun and inclusive, and it spread by word of mouth. People sent it to their friends.”

Kulash had asked his sister to come up with a dance routine, to confuse their fans. They came up with the “A Million Ways” backyard dance to, as Kulash says, “break the format of a hipster rock show by giving joy.” That first dance was downloaded so much they decided to raise the stakes and came up with the treadmill dance.

“The difference between music videos and Internet music videos is that Internet videos make you like people,” Kulash says. “They don’t feel like an armature of promotion, like in MTV videos. They’re not this big and glossy thing over a band.”