In case you missed it, it’s festival season in Australia.
That’s if the barrage of glitter-covered boobs (yes, really), sequin-emblazoned festival pictures on your Instagram feed over the last week hadn’t given the game away.
Yes, people have voluntarily given up a warm bed, proper toilet and WiFi to camp in a field with hundreds of thousands of strangers. Oh, and listen to some music.
But over the last few years or so, the tunes have been overtaken by something even flashier – the outfits.
While fashion has always been a big part of festivals since their inception in 1969 with Woodstock, the last decade has seen it explode. You no longer just go to a festival – you meticulously source, plan and dress for it. There’s the ‘you’ in real life, and then the wilder, more carefree and hippy festival ‘you’.
Music festivals provide an opportunity to experiment with fashion, a place where the normal rules of dressing no longer apply. The results? Bright, bold, barely there and probably not suitable for the office.
But while some may look at festival fashion in 2017 and see little more cloth than you would on a tea towel, it’s got nothing to do with modern dressing. In fact, festival style in the last few years has more in common with the original festivals in the 1960s than most other decades, with a move back to the free spirit mode of where it all began.
