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Real Festival Fashion
Other | Thursday 24th July 2014 | Serena
Every year you get the same ad campaigns around festival season theres a completely made up trend by Topshop claiming they have all your ‘festival gear’, and then you wonder why everyone has the same leopard print wellies as you. Instead of buying into trends of mass produced foreign made clothes, why don’t you take a look at the below pictures for your festival outfit inspiration. It’s always been the people that make a festival fun and its the people who do the real dressing up whom give it its whimiscal spirit and also cause the best photo moments. Theres no other better festival opportunity to dress as anything you want than Bestival.
Founded and curated by DJ Rob Da Bank and his illustrator wife, Josie, Bestival is now in its 11th year, and twice voted the UK’s best major festival. In 2004, the festival's inaugural year, Rob explains, "we thought 10, 20, maybe 50 people might come in fancy dress, and we'd do a little parade in the middle of the madness. But no, half the site – a few thousand people – had got all dressed up. And they weren't run-of-the-mill, throwaway outfits, either, they'd really made the effort."
With stories circulating about the state of British music festivals, in which they are accused of purely being a line up and ridding itself of an actual festival vibe. It's the fun that you make, in dressing up or otherwise, that actually gives the festival its spirit. If you’ve spent big bucks for a festival ticket than you owe it to yourself to go as something else completely. Forget wearing the most expensive or fashionable looks of the season, fashion is about a sense of identity, dressing up however is completely the opposite. "The eccentric nature of dressing up makes a better party," says Rob. "You get on a ferry to the Isle of Wight, so already you're stepping outside of your usual boundaries, and then, once you're dressed up, even your friends might not recognise you, so you can let your hair down and go completely nuts because no one really knows who you are. For me, that's the exciting thing – seeing people turn into other people over the weekend." In the famous words of drag queen Ru Paul, “You we’re born naked and the rest is just drag.” Heres a collection of photos of photographers Dan Smith and Kent Mathews who set up a studio on the Bestival site in 2009 and 2010, they took photos of randoms and the results look like a professional shoot. Their work is now displayed in The Art of Dressing Up in Proud Camden. Can you spot Lilly allen amongst the fantasism.
