What to Wear to Guns N’ Roses’ 2025 Tour

From pretty much the very beginning, Guns N’ Roses were an instantly recognizable band in terms of their outer image.

“I try to express myself through my clothes,” Axl Rose told Rolling Stone in 1989. “It’s another form of the art. I’m not afraid of what people think about different ways I look. I’m gonna do what I want to.”

And Rose was not the only one showing his identity through his clothing.

“Steven [Adler] enjoys the hell out of the clothes he wears,” Rose said, “whereas Slash and I wouldn’t be caught dead in them; then again, there’s things Slash and I wear that Steven wouldn’t be caught dead in either. It’s just different personalities.”

Several of those personalities will be on full display in 2025 when Guns N’ Roses launches their Because What You Want & What You Get Are Two Completely Different Things world tour on May 1 in Incheon, Korea. If you’ve got tickets and you’re pondering your own outfit choices, we have some suggestions for you below with links included.

We’re going to start with perhaps the most obvious fashion accessory: a black top hat like Slash’s. Fortunately, Amazon has what appears to be hundreds of variations on this item depending on your exact style and budget. Slash usually dons a sort of belt buckle-looking band around his like this one, but you can get creative with yours.

And in case you were wondering, no, Slash never meant for his hat to become as iconic as it has. He stole it from a Los Angeles store way back in the day before GNR became superstars. “It just spoke to me,” he explained to Conan O’Brien in 2022. “[It] just became a thing where I just really identified with it. Like I wore it all the time. There was a way you pull it over your eyes; you could hide behind it if you were really high. It was great for bad hair days. I had no intention of it being this long-term show thing.”

Here’s the thing about accessories, particularly in rock ‘n’ roll: they can be both a fashion statement and a practical tool. Such is the case with Rose’s famous bandana headband. “If we’re going to do a show,” he explained in the aforementioned 1989 Rolling Stone interview, “I wear a headband because my hair gets in my face.” Rose’s bandana was often red, but he sometimes sported other colors like blue or purple. Amazon carries basically every color of the rainbow so feel free to branch out.

If you thought temporary tattoos were just for kids at birthday parties, think again. When you look at the musicians on stage during a Guns N’ Roses concert, you’ll notice they pretty much all have visible tattoos. (Followers of Duff McKagan, for example, know that the bassist has occasionally shared photos on Instagram of whatever fresh ink he’s gotten.) Why not match the band a bit? Sure, you could go out and literally get some tattoos, but it’s probably best to stick with the temporary ones for one-night-only.

We have no idea why Rose chose to wear a jersey with the number 22 on it during GNR’s Use Your Illusion tour in the early ’90s. He wore another black jersey, this time with the number 80, when the band performed at the MTV Video Music Awards on Aug. 29, 2002. That one appeared to be an Oakland Raiders football jersey — 80 was wide receiver Jerry Rice’s number. In any case, you can find either of these numbers (22, 80) in classic black jersey form on Amazon.

If you’re going to wear a flannel shirt to a Guns N’ Roses concert, you better make sure it’s not on your shoulders but tied around your waist a la Rose. He’s worn several different color variations of this over the years — red and black, navy and white, etc. — but Amazon has plenty of other color options so you can choose your own favorite.

Slash sure does enjoy a sleeveless number from time to time, especially the denim cutoff kind. (To be fair, some of his bandmates have also sported them.) You could get a plain one, or you could go the extra mile and grab an official Guns N’ Roses sleeveless denim vest from their website, complete with “bullet seal on the back and GN’F’NR across the top back and front panels.”

Rose and Slash are by no means the only rockstars to don aviator sunglasses, but you sort of can’t complete an outfit inspired by either one of them without throwing on a pair. You can, of course, switch things up with the hardware and/or lens color.

Again, Slash picked up the habit of wearing this accessory because it worked as a sort of shield from people. “Now wherever you go, because everybody’s got camera phones, people take your picture, and you just end up never taking the shades off,” he told The New Zealand Herald in 2015. “And I rarely look out at the crowd. It makes me very uncomfortable to look directly into the face of the crowd.”

This one won’t work for everyone, but if you’re someone with long enough locks, you could really get the Slash look by curling your hair with a small-barreled curling iron like this one. (Of course, you could also wear a wig.) Weirdly, Slash’s hair on the cover of GNR’s debut album Appetite for Destruction is….straight? But we all know the real signature look is those voluminous curls.

We saved the most daring for last. Though he doesn’t anymore, there was a time when Rose often wore tiny white shorts, and we really cannot emphasize the word “tiny” enough. So if you’re feeling brave — and the weather is warm enough — Amazon has you covered….well, at least in the figurative sense.