Coachella is a Racist Fast-Fashion Hellscape.
Let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Picture it: you’re an extra-terrestrial life form visiting Earth on an exchange program. Someone tells you that a music festival is taking place in the desert. Using the limited knowledge of human civilization that you’ve acquired, you assume that the purpose of said music festival is to attend musical performances, during which you listen to and enjoy music.
You would be—more or less—completely wrong.
The true purpose of attending musical festivals like Coachella is to be seen attending Coachella, in a series of increasingly outlandish and wildly impractical outfits that will never be worn again. It has become a glorified fashion show, featuring distasteful fast fashion nightmares that lean heavily into cultural appropriation.
What do all of those pictures have in common? Low quality, cheaply produced items with limited utility that will very likely be worn once and once only (after generating some truly alarming tan lines). Now if these items represent your personal style, that’s a different story. I don’t know your life!! Maybe you’ll wear those rainbow cloud platform sneakers every day, passing them on to future generations as a family heirloom. But the vast majority of “influencers” posting their Coachella outfits on social media will wear them once before discarding them, because they’re deliberately purchasing these clothes to create an aesthetic that isn’t necessarily consistent with their individual style. After the content has been created for social media, the clothes either fall apart or get tossed in the back of a closet. Either way, the final destination is a landfill (maybe in the Coachella desert!). Such is the nature of fast fashion. These clothes aren’t built to last longer than the duration of an Instagram photo shoot.
This is the danger of trying to emulate an aesthetic that doesn’t reflect your personal style. What we’ve decided is the festival “look” is an eclectic mix of bohemian, edgy, and what I can only describe as Gen Z/Euphoria-inspired nightmare fuel. The issue is not the aesthetic itself. The aesthetic is fine! Not my style, which is why you won’t see me putting a Latex bodysuit with enormous, perineum-exposing cutouts and a cowperson hat in my shopping cart. The issue is the performative edginess of festival fashion, which dates all the way back to Woodstock.
Woodstock was a music festival in 1969 in which hundreds of thousands of mostly palm-colored individuals pooped in a field for three days while enjoying musical performances that were probably amazing. What they wore was a deliberate reflection of the countercultural, anti-establishment values of that time: attendees wore hand-made and up-cycled clothes that left little to the imagination, as a direct response to the increasingly sterilized corporate stuffiness of the previous decade. In a misguided attempt to be seen as “one with nature”, Woodstock attendees often appropriated styles that were directly pilfered from indigenous traditions, illustrating the longstanding vague connection that White Americans make between indigenous culture and respect for the natural world. Even more bizarrely, South Asian garments and accessories were just as commonly featured, including bindis and images of Hindu goddesses. I can only surmise that the White Americans of that time felt that channeling Hinduism was a groovy way to reject Judeo-Christian traditions.
Without a shred of irony or self-awareness, Woodstock-goers appropriated the aesthetics of different cultures without understanding or crediting members of those cultures, as colonizers are wont to do, while ostensibly seeking to overtly reject the establishment that was built on colonialism.
This lack of self-awareness has evidently been passed on through the time and space to the influencers currently congregating in the Coachella Valley in Southern California. Unlike their many palm-colored predecessors who pooped in fields near Woodstock, New York all those decades ago, I don’t think present-day festival-goers care about the music at all. I believe that what they care about is creating content for their social media platforms and enacting some modern-day iteration of anti-establishment, counter-culture, edginess—which, in an example of hilarious irony—requires buying lots and lots of stuff, throwing it all away, and buying more.
Of course, hundreds of thousands of Instragrammers swarming the desert in fast fashion surely generates an unimaginable amount of toxic waste and pollution, adding corruption of the natural environment to the long list of Coachella-related offenses. And I haven’t even mentioned that the owner of the organization that hosts Coachella is a right-wing billionaire who has previously donated large amounts of cake to anti-LGBT groups. But the fact that oodles of Basic Beckys still go to Coachella solely to don headdresses, South Asian-inspired body jewelry, henna tattoos, and dream catcher earrings, thinking that they’re performing counterculture when they’re, in fact, engaging in relentless consumerism, makes me want to vomit glitter.
But at least it’s biodegradable body glitter, right?
