Bucket hats, animal prints, bell-bottoms, cowboy hats — there are a lot of different looks and articles of clothing that come to mind when someone says “festival fashion.” While that might leave first-time-festival goers or infrequent partiers wondering what they hell they’re supposed to wear to an indie, electro, hip-hop, or EDM dance-a-thon, it’s a good problem to have, trust. We’re living in an expressive age when it comes to festival wear, like the music we listen to, it’s a mix of styles, eras, genre, and attitudes.
Just 10 short years ago, music festival fashion was indebted to hippie-leaning earth tones, flowy scarves, and hats. Unless it was rave — in which case the time-honored staples of lingerie and vivid color-blocking were easy go-to’s. If you’re wondering what people were wearing to hip-hop festivals 10 years ago, this may come as a shock to you but, those weren’t really a thing yet, at least not on the scale they are today. To put into perspective how much the vibe of the modern music festival has changed, 2009s Coachella had headlining performances by Paul McCartney, The Killers, and The Cure, with their biggest hip-hop performers being M.I.A. and Atmosphere. 2019, by comparison, featured Childish Gambino, Ariana Grande, and Tame Impala, with supporting acts like Anderson .Paak, Juice WRLD, Solange, J Balvin, Kid Cudi, Khalid, Bad Bunny, YG, Playboi Carti, Lizzo, Wiz Khalifa….
You get the idea. Music is gleefully all over the place and so is festival fashion. If you don’t know what to wear to a festival, you’re overthinking it. Anything goes. If you want to wear a cowboy hat with animal print leggings and heart-shaped glasses, you do you.
No festival illustrates this fact quite like San Diego’s CRSSD did two weeks ago. So we’ve collected all of the best looks from the ground floor at CRSSD — from the most sensible looks to the most insane — to prove that the best festival fashion to wear in the modern age is clothing that reflects the personality of the wearer, nothing more and nothing less.
