By Sofia Ishoy
Dressing for the front row
Festival season peeks from behind spring’s door: in the conversation around sustainable festival fashion UK, what do you see?
Your favourite artist, finally returning to the stage, or perhaps something entirely different. A catwalk that watches without reaction, sitting in the front row - impossible to impress.
Glitter has been done. Boots too. Nothing lands. Still, you meticulously pick out a 3-day dress code as if it might.
Avoidant fashion
Drawing on surveys, The Fashion Law reports that single-use outfits for music festivals, such as Glastonbury and Coachella alone ‘account for approximately $307 million worth of items per year, or about 7.5 million outfits worn only once’. How can attachment form if we are not in a long-term relationship with our clothes? This lack of attachment is not incidental, but structural and exacerbated by a demand for constant renewal and the fear of being seen twice in the same outfit online.
A recent study on ‘outfit predictability fatigue’ found that 38% of gen Z avoid repeating outfits in photos due to a fear of negative perception. For, repetition is often mistaken for a lack of imagination.
Repetition as extravagance
Over time, garments can help to form an understanding of who we are, but we repeatedly submit to the desire for novelty, garments relegated to a momentary thrill.
This starts to resemble the dynamics of avoidant attachment: a discomfort with developing an intimate relationship, but here people are replaced with clothes. This reluctance to commit to a particular garment carries both psychological and environmental weight, and what we fail to attach to we then find easier – almost relieving – to throw away. However, Earth cannot dispose of waste quite so flippantly.
Clothing as canvas
What if we looked at what we wear as a blank canvas rather than a finished idea?
In the festival scenario, imagine assembling your appearance not for how it will look to others, but by selecting pieces that feel most curious to you e.g., the right textures to absorb what you are searching for, or draw you in with an inexplicable magnetism. Can a particular song give shape to what you are wearing? Coloured by the singer’s voice and lightly threaded by the drunken tone of a stranger next to you, their voice slips into yours until it feels like it came from your own mouth, the moment holds you together and the urge to stand out as an individual through your attire begins to matter less.
I propose that re-wearing accentuates the imagination. Within sustainable festival fashion, repetition is a reorientation of creativity. Attention is diverged from visibility – what we can we pour out with clothing – to what we can we soak in. There is freedom in this shift.
The question, ‘who will you dress for?’ becomes less intimidating, and to ask it properly enables us to turn inward, into a more imaginative space.
Rick Owens puts it as: ‘What I wear is a logical answer to the way I live (…) I don’t really have anything I want to say everyday with my clothes, so they’ve become a sort of uniform.’
Authenticity lives in repetition, enabling certain clothes to become an extension of the self over time, rather than a fragmented series of aesthetics compressed into a festival’s timeframe. Maybe there is no need to assert an all-encompassing identity so urgently.
Owens references designer Jean-Michel Frank, who owned forty identical grey flannel suits, calling it ‘the height of modesty and extravagance at the same time’. Repetition signals certainty of who you are. Decisiveness is striking.
Re-wearing and collective memory
What if clothes worked to bring us closer, rather than holding us in separate corners.
By re-wearing, we enable clothes to gather and hold specific memories, growing their consciousness by attending more events. Over time, they become familiar faces whom we want to hang around and such companions are harder to dispose of.
At UK festivals, hundreds of thousands of tents are left behind each year. Clothes follow a similar path, brought with the intention to be worn once and discarded. A Guardian article last year noted that some abandoned tents have since been repurposed into bags, but unlike tents, most garments are not recovered. For sustainable festival fashion in the UK, can we recycle clothes in the same way or better i.e., keeping them from reaching that point at all? To re-wear is to be slightly vulnerable but champions a resistance to this avoidant pattern.
