Australia’s Best And Most Questionable Festival Fashion Trends
We've all been guilty of them at some point.
The annual musical rodeo that is Coachella will kick off next month, meaning once again our timelines will be overloaded by fake-tanned influencers that are dressed as if they’ve just gone through a Glassons tumble dryer.
Festival fashion is big business — most outlets now release lines specifically geared to wear around the Splendour paddock, such is the pressure to take the perfect ‘Gram. It didn’t use to be this polished of course, and over the years festival fashion has swung from the benign (flower crowns) to the outright cringeworthy and offensive (see: bodybuilder shorts, cultural appropriation).
We’ve gone back over the years to highlight some of the biggest fashion trends to grace Australia’s festival scene.
After all, we were all guilty of one of them at some point.
The Festival Shirt
At the beginning of 2019, mainstream media was entranced by the phenomenon of the Festival Shirt. Hundreds of bros were appearing at festivals cloaked in the same black, yellow, and white striped shirt from Cotton On — handily called the ‘Festival Shirt’.
There were a couple of variations in colour (red, white, and blue was also popular) but yellow was by far the most dominant. At last year’s FOMO Festival, we sent a couple of our intrepid reporters to see just how many of them they could spot — and the results were damning.
Photo Credit: James Anthony/Music Junkee
Anything — And We Mean Anything — Fluorescent
In 2007, as Daft Punk’s Alive tour was tracking across the globe, it seemed you couldn’t turn your head without seeing someone draped head-to-toe in vivid fluoro. It couldn’t just be one item of clothing. Oh no, this had to be an offensively bright outfit — most likely paired with glow-stick bracelets and earrings.
“Like the homeboy of yesteryear and the emo of yesterday, Australia is today caught up in a whole new fashion trend, and it’s hard to miss. Yes, it’s fluoro,” inthemix wrote back in 2007. “On the national Parklife festival tour recently, this trend seemingly hit its peak when it seemed as though every second punter had at least one fluoro fashion item or accessory added to their attire.”
According to those on the ground, by next year’s Parklife fluoro had almost entirely disappeared. A sad loss.
The ubiquitous ‘rage hat’. Photo Credit: inthemix
Colourful Print Shirts
While the Festival Shirt burned brightest, it faded fairly quickly from the scene. Bonkers and colourful printed shirts, on the other hand, have a been a staple of festival bro wardrobes for years. You know the ones — they’re covered head to waist in glittering pineapples or watermelons or something of the sort.
They can also be seen in their more powerful, evolved form: the jumpsuit, or romper.
Photo Credit: jayjays.com/uideazone
This Floppy Hat Thing
If you’d gone to Splendour in 2014 you might have found your view of the stage almost entirely obscured by women wearing almost exactly the same maroon, floppy hat. The origins of its popularity are murky: it seems to have been popularised by Sienna Miller at Glastonbury in 2013, and Vanessa Hudgens at Coachella in 2014.
Whatever the reason, for a few years it was impossible to swing a hat without knocking one of these hats off someone’s head. You can occasionally still see them today, bobbing meekly in the distance.
Photo Credit: wish.com
Train Conductor Hats
The uglier cousin of the floppy hat, the train conductor headgear (it’s actually called a Fiddler hat, or a pageboy, but who ever calls them that honestly) is a mainstay of festival fashion.
PSA: if someone approaches you at a festival wearing this hat, they will definitely ask whether you have any ketamine.
Photo Credit: theiconic.com.au
Flower Crowns
Lana Del Rey’s contribution to the culture has been vast, and isn’t limited to her excellent back catalogue. The singer rocked up to Splendour in 2012 with a delicate crown of flowers and a flowing veil placed upon her head, inadvertently kicking off one of the biggest Australian festival fashion trends ever.
For the next few years suburban flowerbeds would be picked clean and trees would be completely stripped as industrious punters attempted to place as much flora on their head as they could. These days, you struggle to know whether you’re at Laneway or in Midsommar.
Florence Pugh’s Midsommar look was entirely based on a Falls Festival punter – true story.
Cultural Appropriation
It’s 2020, and dickheads at festivals are still rocking up wearing Native American headdresses, and white girls are still sticking bindis on their heads. Thankfully, some festivals have taken steps to make sure this kind of offensive bullshit doesn’t get through the gates — but no matter how many times people are told, they still continue to do it.
Repeat it in the mirror: Cultures are not your costumes.
See this? Don’t do this.
Animal Onesies
At some point at every festival, you’ll find yourself in the line for the toilets behind a number of guys dressed as various mammals — a skunk here, a koala there, a unicorn — and you will audibly groan, as you know they’re too drunk to unbutton at a normal speed, and you’ll have to spend an extra 20 minutes in line just so they can not shit themselves.
Also, a full-length flannelette outfit worn at the height of the Australia summer…that’s heatstroke waiting to happen.
Not strictly a onesie, but imagine being in loo line behind this bloke. Photo Credit: Funidelia.com.au
Bum Bags & Speed Dealers
The resurgence of the bum bag — pushed by Festival Shirt old mates Cotton On, and a stack of other outlets — is one of 2020’s most worrying trends. They are invariably worn by the kind of gurning guy that either wants to sell you 50 caps, or just wants 50 caps. Disappointing, because honestly they’re a pretty useful piece of fashion: woe betide the person who brings an actual bag to a festival.
Speed dealer sunnies are in the realm of the bum bag — you just know that this person is gonna turn to you and ask when Fisher’s playing, despite him not even being on the line-up. Still, there’s a certain warm nostalgia to the speed dealer sunnies, a nod to a time when Darude was considered the coolest person on the face of the planet.
Group Outfits
It is a truth universally acknowledged that at every festival you will find a group of friends dressed as Where’s Wally. Or the Super Mario Bros. Or the Power Rangers. Or bananas. Or even — in a truly hellish move — Minions.
It seems like a smart move — you should be able to easily find your friend in a crowd when they’re wearing the same outfit as you — until you realise that at least 400 other groups of friends have also had the same idea, resulting in the entire festival grounds looking like a Wally convention. You never see your friend again.
Sure, you might think this was a World Record Challenge, but it was actually Splendour In The Grass 2018. (Maybe.) Photo Credit: William Murphy/Flickr
Gladiator Sandals
Gladiator sandals roared into fashion in late 2014 and early 2015, spreading from the runways (Vogue covered it liberally) to the grimy grounds of Australian festivals. According to Vogue, it had been around for, quite literally, thousands of years — with the original shoes having first tapped their way down the cobbled streets of Rome, before being widely popularised in fashion in the 1960s.
They haven’t been seen around for a few years, but according to some they’re about to make a comeback. Meaning that, once again, we can all wake up the day after a festival with a lovely, dusty ring pattern on our legs. The dream.
These Goddamn Shorts
The fall of Stereosonic was a sad moment for the Australian festival industry — but what wasn’t sad was the disappearance of these fucking shorts.
