Music festivals are meant to be a bit disgusting. If you’ve never waded through ankle-deep mud to a festering, overused portaloo, have you ever really lived? This griminess has left its muddy footprints all over festival fashion, too. It’s Keira Knightley and Jamie Dornan in mud-splattered jeans, or Sienna Miller draped in a grey hoodie with an unlit cigarette drooping from her mouth. It’s weathered, functional and slightly undone.

While British festivals conjure images of mud slides, flooded tents and K-holes, their US counterparts are much more sanitised – and so is their style. When you think of Coachella fashion, you probably picture flowy boho dresses, flower crowns, fringe jackets and the culturally appropriative headwear that certain celebs would rather you forget about.

Coachella fashion has aged like a landfill indie band. What was once fun now feels stale and cringe. Each April, celebrities and influencers are helicoptered into the desert with full glam squads – not a splash of mud in sight. The process is smooth and frictionless, with every moment optimised to look good on screen. Each outfit is meticulously curated to appear free-spirited, which obviously misses the point, and the result is a largely soulless facsimile of festival fashion.

“With the rise of Instagram in the early 2010s, Coachella fashion was no longer just about the clothes. It was about content”

It wasn’t always this way. Photos from the festival’s first-ever edition in 1999 reveal a sea of t-shirts, vests, sneakers and jean shorts. Festival-goers dressed practically for three days in the sweltering desert (temperatures soared to 48 degrees celsius that year) and their style reflected the laidback ethos of rock fans at the time. By the mid-00s, after Rolling Stone dubbed it “America’s best festival”, Coachella started to attract celebrities like Paris Hilton, Nichole Richie and Mischa Barton. Their boho-style paisley mini dresses, suede fringe jackets, jean shorts and patterned bandanas were snapped by the paparazzi who followed them, establishing what we now think of as ‘Coachella fashion’. It wasn’t long before fast fashion brands like Forever 21, Topshop and H&M were cashing in on the trend. Today, Coachella influencer fit pics still tend to look more like Urban Outfitters catalogues than fun, authentic festival moments. 

With the rise of Instagram in the early 2010s, Coachella fashion was no longer just about the clothes. It was about content. In 2015, fast fashion company Revolve launched its own exclusive invite-only festival near Coachella, which has become one of the most coveted invitations on the influencer calendar – a hotspot for networking, content creation and celeb spotting. This year’s tightly controlled guestlist included Teyana Taylor, BLACKPINK’s Lisa and Gabbriette.

Since the mid-2010s, the Coachella influencer economy has only grown, giving it the derisive nickname ‘the influencer Olympics’. Today, marketers’ budgets can “reach into the high six figures to over a million dollars” for high-profile influencers to attend the festival. The goal is to create fashion moments that live on beyond the festival itself, but it’s hard to imagine these looks having as much moodboard longevity as Kate Moss or Alexa Chung trudging through the mud at Glasto. Brands want to take advantage of Coachella’s proximity to culture and visibility on social media, but the results feel sterile and blatantly mercenary.

Festival dressing is most fun and innovative when it balances style and practicality: chaotic layering, overstuffed crossbody bags and smudges of last night’s makeup. It shouldn’t work, but it does, because the best looks feel lived in. Inventiveness springs from inconvenience. But when influencers are transported in and out of the festival with a team of stylists, that gritty charm is lost. Even the crowds look bored. Everyone is watching themselves being watched.

It all represents a wider overreliance on nostalgia and referencing rather than creating something new. Today’s festival fashion code is countercultural and bohemian, drawing from the hippy subculture of the 1960s and 70s, but it couldn’t be further removed from the anticonsumerist attitudes which these movements embodied. It’s an imitation of an imitation.

While Coachella brings together some of the biggest artists in the world, the broader culture has become increasingly fragmented. Lacking any unifying trend or subculture, we are forced to rely on old references, turning style into a costume as disposable as an ultra-fast fashion haul. Coachella influencer fashion is proof that every moment of our real, living, breathing, partying lives can be optimised for the algorithm. It’s no longer a trend, but a dull cover version that never sounds quite as good as the original.