Small plate cowgirls

A trend report on festival fashion and the state of the human spirit

I spent the last week and a half eating, sleeping and breathing Coachella. I was not there, but several times a day I’d receive some sort of dispatch from California. Over text, WhatsApp, email. Pics of girls in this or that, reflections on what it meant that the girls were wearing that or this. A little bit of this reporting showed up in my diary series, but most of it didn’t.

Big Trend Piece wants you to think Coachella is uninteresting (except for their takes on how over it is!), that the festival is an affront to the real festivals, where everyone is having real fun and influencers don’t roam around like packs of daffy lions. Sure, yeah.

But new things are happening, even at Coachella, and we should talk about them. Culture didn’t stop moving just because it’s dead.

Plus Coachella kicks off festival season, so it’s a little look into what the summer will look like.

Here it all is, cut up for you like fruit.

Yes!

Pants were hauled off in wheelbarrows

One of the main things I heard about Coachella this year is that asses were out in a serious way. Like literally out.

Annie, a photographer and writer from LA, sent me a few snaps to illustrate.

Along with the following reflection:

Is the ass back? This experience has me wondering…

Sakura, American Style Coachella food editor-at-large, said the same: “So many ‘cowgirls.’ And so many asses out.”

Violet, who lives in New York and works in PR, reported that “the Miu Miu effect was palpable on the ground” and that micro-shorts, downwind of the 2023 Miu Miu collection that made many women go pantless to parties, were a community favorite.

More on Miuccia-dupes later…

Small plate cowgirls

Let’s get the boring stuff over with. Cowgirl sightings were reported by all my ladies with boots on the ground.

Annie’s first message to me from the festival grounds read: “The pulse is that the Stagecoach-ification of Coachella is fully underway.” Stagecoach, for those not familiar, is Coachella’s hick little sister: a country music festival that takes place the weekend after Coachella ends. At the same place, put on by the same entertainment company.

My first thought was: really? That many cowgirls? Lil Nas X brought a party-friendly cowboy LARP to the world in 2020 with his TikTok hit “Old Town Road” ft. Billy Ray Cyrus. I’m aware that girls are still clopping from small plate to small plate in cowboy boots but I didn’t expect so much to do with assless chaps halfway through the 2020s.

Mental swipe mode

We all know that Coachella is notorious in terms of its estrangement from the living-in-the-moment, PLUR mindset that has been attached to music festivals since Woodstock. Coachella is the festival equivalent of what the world hates about Americans — phones are fully out, anyface influencers are sucking in their invisible stomachs for pics, Tana Mongeau is getting arrested, no, someone’s just wearing a t-shirt with her Coachella mugshot on it. Revolve Fest is bumping in the background.

But wtf is the vibe actually, how are people acting? All the A.S. girls-on-the-ground reported having an amazing, close-to-God time. Of course they mentioned the influencers too — both Annie and Ash from weekend 1 ran into James Charles. Ash observed Tara Yummy, TikTok’s tiny Hot Topic princess, locked in in VIP.

Annie with James Charles

But Annie also reported sinister, if not entirely surprising, behavior following Lady Gaga’s big headlining set during weekend 1.

Everybody was glued to the performance in total Reels mode. Not lots of dancing, just mouth slightly open with spittle at the corners. Mental swipe mode activated.

I genuinely think phones are a problem at concerts and live events. They are deadening us to the raw experience of collective consciousness, which is pretty much why people have a good time seeing anything live.

Annie said it felt like people were more engaged when she went to Coachella as a high school student in 2019, though she admits she was on her “stoner vibe” back then (she’s since experienced “the Gen Z weed paranoia freakout”). Drug use, by the way, was reported to be fairly standard, but it was also “giving Goop sobriety here in the desert.”

Of the modern festival phone-opticon, Annie said:

It’s actually sort of sad... I thought maybe Coachella was the last frontier for behaving outside of the realm of the camera phone? Paradoxically maybe, as of course it’s influencer central.

Then something so definitive of the experience of being in public these days:

Each point A to point B is a unique labyrinth formed by avoiding being an NPC gracing the background of hard-post pics.

On normie attendance, she wrote:

Forgive me for my noble savage characterization or whatever — the normies are still outside. Men in jerseys and women in tactical outfits. T-shirts and sweat-wicking shorts.

Violet saw a lot of functional garments like backpacks and baseball caps, especially on men.

There were utilitarian kings abound! I made fun of how many of them were covering their mouth with a bandana for the whole weekend, but I am currently dealing with a phlegm-heavy cough that may be karmic repentance.

Girl (so confusing) we’re so back

Another thing I heard across the board: the public’s “styling” was confused, confusing (I use scare quotes, but let’s be real: every girl with a TikTok is her own stylist now). Andrea, KCRW queen and one half of the wonderful Culture Journalist podcast, spoke of the ambient down-home-boho thing going on (which she also initially described as Stagecoach-ification).

No one could quite put their finger on this look. It was cowboy, but also pirate? And slutty milk maid.

Here’s Violet on the accessories of desert boho amnesia:

A lot of hair was long and had curls that look shaped through conductive powers of the Dyson Airwrap. Sometimes the hair was accessorized (silk bandanas, the Y2K disco belts that were all the rave this summer on TikTok slouched on lower hips and laid atop some micro-shorts, some mini skirts and some long skirts (which were usually white).

Overall, Andrea, who has been to and reported on many Coachellas, called “dressing for Coachella” so back. The fashion of the past few years was more muted in comparison. Remember in 2023 (and 2022) when Hailey Bieber and the Jenner sisters wore white tank tops and blue jeans? It was interpreted by the trendchatters as a subtle flex — they didn’t need to do the boho dog-and-pony show like the Instagram girls.

Here’s Andrea’s theory of so back-ness:

It almost felt like the energy and style picked up from 2019. Which IF WE RECALL was the last Coachella when Trump was in office and things felt so chaotic and uncertain. Like these past few post-pandemic years were maybe more about re-acclimation, and now it feels more reactive, like a recalibration.

Nowtime

When we interviewed the world famous fashion historian Dr. Valerie Steele on Nymphet Alumni last year, she mentioned the flattening effect of nowtime, which is the idea that everything is trending or familiar at once. “It's like people have a mental Rolodex, but there's no calendar related to it.”

This idea came up in everyone’s notes. It’s related to the feeling of confusion described above, but it’s not exactly the same. It’s more about the sensation of digesting hundreds and thousands of different aesthetics, trends and signals at once, versus being confused by the conflicting elements of an individual outfit.

Here’s Violet on what it felt like:

At Coachella, I experienced sartorial whiplash. Or at least, that’s the best way to describe what I experienced. There was a hoard of people to behold at every turn, and everyone was wearing something wildly different.

Andrea mentioned that a lot of people were wearing coordinated looks — not just girls with their boyfriends, but also (especially) gays with their besties. She had some interesting thoughts on matching outfits, vibe-tribes and the factioning of visual culture:

Some of it is of course practical and intentional — it just makes it easier to find each other. But also, we live in a world where on a daily basis we’re more used to seeing individuals rather than groups.

And at Coachella you’re constantly seeing groups, and so you can’t help but identify various visual factions. Maybe because a lot of individuals are dressing to align themselves with something aspirationaly.

Visual culture has become so hyper-factioned because of social media, and I feel like that was extremely apparent this weekend.

Last night was a Miu-vie

Miu Miu… Miu Miu Miu Miu. Violet kept her eye out for girls taking inspo from Miuccia’s big booming baby, whether they knew it or not:

I noticed there was one particular style that was REALLY popular — the Steve Madden Rocky boots, a dupe for the Miu Miu leather buckled boot. Like, a lot of people were wearing this exact pair. I even saw a whole friend group collectively sporting it. I tried to snap a pic every time I spotted them.

Miu Miu Steve Madden Rocky boots

Speaking of dupes, fast fashion was apparently everywhere, of course. Violet began her WhatsApp report with this statement:

Firstly, fast fashion is alive, well, and thriving. The preponderance of garments seemingly bought from fast fashion retailers might have been tied to the event itself. People wear festival gear to festivals — single-use items bought for an event or two.

The biggest fast fashion dog whistle seemed to be a specific boho amnesia belt, low slung with metal discs, which Ash first brought to our attention in her diary.

Belts in the wild

Women

Something is happening in the economy of body parts. I’ll have to keep my eye on this as summer rolls in. Not only are ass cheeks firmly in, there are also two distinct camps of trying to be hot: the first is glam, brows done, very BBL-core, but everyone is skinny now.

The second is that ironic Charli XCX thing that definitely did not start with brat summer but certainly spread like shingles during. Violet saw people wearing neon ‘HOT’ stickers on their clavicles and arms — the ones you’d find on rotisserie chickens in the grocery store.

She had an idea on why…

The ‘hot person at work’ shirt (the OGBFF style that Charli featured in her weekend 2 Insta dump) has been deconstructed.

Andrea reported a lot of girls in VIP this year seemed to be OnlyFans/sex-worker types. “Speaks to how long and blurry the definition of influencer has become." Deffo.

Men

No one talks about them enough. Apparently they were dressed… somewhat well.

Andrea reports:

At A.G. Cook (and adjacent type acts) at least, and maybe in general, the men’s fits were more interesting to me than the women’s, which felt new. Maybe more Gen Z are coming out.

Men of Coachella

I think this has something to do with Patrick Schwarzenegger wearing a Throwing Fits hat. (Annie saw Patrick surveying the crowd, possibly “hoping someone would approach and compliment his hashtag serious acting performance”).

The sartorial power couple was also present, Andrea reports, and one half of that was usually a man.

Couples!

She described something she coined Luigicore, which obviously was only worn by men.

I saw a guy with a green Mario-style Luigi hat, another guy with a “DENY DEFEND DEPOSE” shirt, and a guy with a Unabomber shirt. [Editorial note: Unabomber guy was also photographed by Ash, not sure if they’re friends.]

The Coachella Diaries mystery man

Alternately — a guy with a shaved head and a tattoo of an AK-47 at the base of his neck. And then a guy with a large tattoo of a hammer and sickle on his chest (which may have been fake).

The former at Gaga, the latter at Charli. Mario at Darkside, DENY DEFEND DEPOSE at Misfits (lol), Unabomber in VIP at Green Day.

Wow.

Weekend 2

No one talks about it enough. As a woman of public radio, Andrea always goes to both weekends. She says that weekend 1 isn’t a music festival, it’s a platform. Weekend 2, she explains, is the actual festival — in the traditional fun/communal/music-focused sense.

“Because there’s less extractive value and hence less surveillance for capitalism, baby!”

I hope you enjoyed the inaugural edition of the American Style Coachella Diaries. I loved doing it and thank everyone who took part: Ash, Sakura, Morgan, Violet, Andrea, Annie. True Style Stars.

Now that festival season has officially started, I’d like to put out an open call: Are you going to a music festival this summer? Do you want to write about it for American Style?

Email me, dm me, let’s talk 💋 bizsherbert@substack.com. I’m particularly keen on the idea of diaries from Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, EDC (Las Vegas?) and any of those big electronic music festivals in Europe.

PLUR!