Riffs: Robin Givhan on India.Arie's butterfly wings

Singer with butterfly wings. (Photo by by Margot Schulman)

India.Arie gave a spirited performance at the Kennedy Center Monday night, but I wasn't feeling her encore outfit: A pair of butterfly wings that a pre-schooler would wear on Halloween. Didn't she get the memo about setting aside childish things?

Washington Post fashion editor Robin Givhan also attended the performance but had a different take on Arie's pretty wings. Click Track asked for her thoughts and here's what she had to say:

"I have to admit that I was startled when India.Arie returned to the stage at the Kennedy Center for her encore wearing a pair of rainbow-colored butterfly wings. I sort of chalked it up to the singer's crunchy-granola, sage-burning, Yoruba-soul personality. As a fashion-statement, it was right up there with a bad art school graduation show. (I'm sure I've seen wings on some runway or another, but I've purged the image from my memory.) But since India was singing about hope -- in a clap-along way -- I thought it was reasonable that she turned herself into a live-action Disney character. I could envision her floating over a technicolor city with the flowers below blooming in slow-motion. Trippy. But wholly legal."