Is the Coachella Uniform Inevitable?
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Camille FreestoneThu, April 9, 2026 at 1:33 PM UTC
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“Everyone knows about the awful disc belt moment from 2025,” says Madeline Rad, of last year’s Coachella It item. The 26-year-old California resident and longtime Coachella attendee is referring to a brown belt with grommet-embellished leather discs overlaid one next to the other with a big gold belt buckle in the middle, often worn slung low on the hips. TikTok accounts documented the belt’s explosion across ensemble after ensemble—as did the attendees. “Hopefully I don't see many this year.” But there’s always something like that: an explosive yet fleeting microtrend at the live music event that’s become a breeding ground for what we think of as “festival style.”
A festival goer in 2025Maya Dehlin Spach - Getty Images
Before the disc belt, there were flower crowns, body chains, short overalls, statement chokers, bralettes, gladiator sandals, and heart sunglasses. Stuck somewhere between fashion and function, a Coachella uniform of sorts has taken shape in the decades since the festival’s inception. It all crystallized in the early 2010s thanks to widely shared photos of celebs like Vanessa Hudgens and the Jenner and Hadid sisters. But today, we associate the look so directly with 2016, the year that was briefly trending on social media as a locus for all of our ambient nostalgia.
But it’s a chaotic formula at best. There’s often little clothing actually involved. (This is a festival in the desert, after all.) It’s typically a swarm of swimsuit tops and itty-bitty shorts punctuated with the latest microtrends and It items. A decade later, heading into the 2026 lineup, can that idea really evolve? Or is Coachella style forever stuck in 2016?
Vanessa Hudgens at Coachella in 2012Christopher Polk - Getty Images
Rad grew up going to this festival and has many core memories because of it; live music and the culture around it shaped so much of her personal style. This year, she’s planning on attending once more with a group of her friends—and the group chats have already begun diagramming their style plans. “I think this year we are going to see a lot of early-to-mid 2010s mixed with modern minimalism,” she predicts. “Like if Sleaze, boho, and Copenhagen style had a baby. Skirts and shorts that are either so miniature you can barely see them or worn four sizes too big, animal print, beads, crochet skull caps, baseball caps, brightly dyed hair, white tanks, and outfits with one statement piece.” Nearly all of Rad’s shopping is done secondhand, emblematic of the habits of her generation. “I love Depop with all my heart,” she says, noting that some of her key search terms for this year’s festival include “Supreme, DKNY, vintage Abercrombie & Fitch, Free People, gauchos/capris, halter tops, track jacket, oversized [everything] but also mini [everything], off the shoulder, slouch/hobo bags.”
Kendall and Kylie Jenner at Coachella in 2015Papjuice/Bauer-Griffin - Getty Images
The words may be different, but is the look? Stylist Stephanee Santamaría is preparing to outfit artist Gigi Perez for her spot on the 2026 lineup, and she’s thinking a lot about the evolution of the festival. She says the answer is yes—things have changed. “The 2016 Coachella moment was undeniably influential, but it also reflected a very specific, almost uniform way of dressing,” she says of the boho silhouettes accessorized with big necklaces, distressed denim, and fringe. It was “expressive, but it also became quite predictable through the years.”
According to Santamaría, that is no longer the case. “Today, the visual language of festival style feels far more nuanced and individual. Rather than revisiting that moment, I see it as a point of contrast, a marker of how much fashion has evolved toward personal expression and intention.”
What does that mean for her client? “Personally, I’m interested in stripping things back. The focus is on pieces that feel considered: strong silhouettes, clean lines, and a sense of ease that doesn’t rely on over-styling. Pieces feel more directional, more refined, and less tied to the idea of ‘festival dressing’ as a category, more representative of the person themself.”
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Zoë Kravitz at Coachella in 2015Rachel Murray - Getty Images
That all makes sense if you think about the broader culture right now, and how it’s evolved since 2016. The year was one of the last times style felt collectively uniform. Trends aren’t so singular anymore. In fact, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. Today, personal style has been fetishized into personal-style-core. As microtrends proliferate faster than we can document, personalizable items like bag charms and excessive layering offer the wearer a trend buy-in they can customize to differentiate themselves.
Coachella is ripe for this sort of hyperlayered, exaggerated expression. Thanks to the extreme conditions, idiosyncratic clothes and accessories become necessities. “As a camper who is on-site for close to 96 hours,” explains Rad, “I have found there is not really an option other than lots of swimsuit tops, loose clothing, headgear and hats, and tiny tanks,” she says. “Anyone can wear these items, but the real way to differentiate yourself and cater to your own style is accessories! Stacking jewelry, sunglasses, socks, scarves, barrettes, nail polish, temporary tattoos, sticker gems, pins, and brooches. My friends and I even bring fairy princess wands for fashion and function. (Pro tip: A light-up princess wand makes finding people a thousand times easier when it gets dark and crowded at night.)”
And the hype that’s been instilled through years of celebrity documentation and the rise of social media curation continues to spawn excitement, encouraging a see-and-be-seen atmosphere. L.A. resident Makena Spencer, also 26, is attending Coachella again this year and says that “there isn't so much a set style or theme. It's more the build-up around this major outfit. Like when you tell people you're going to Coachella, most often their response is ‘Do you have your outfits planned?’ This festival has created such an unspoken dress code, which I think is really a fun opportunity for people to get to express themselves in outfits they may not normally wear.”
Rihanna at Coachella in 2012Christopher Polk - Getty Images
She’s just trying to dial that back a bit this year. In the past, “I used to definitely lean into the idea of dressing for a theme party,” she says, noting a metallic skirt she wore in 2018 as a casualty of this line of thinking. “Now, it still feels like a fun way to explore different things outside of my fashion comfort zone, but with pieces that realistically I would try to wear over and over again.” What does that entail? “A lot of jorts and scarves over the head, for sure.”
The hem lengths of the jorts may evolve from micro-short to knee-length and back again, but the idea remains the same. So is the archetype of Coachella style inevitable? For Bennett Capozzi, a 31-year-old resident of Brooklyn, Coachella style “is ultimately about being glamorous and easy-breezy—and staying cool in the heat. For him, “androgyny is really important for how I show up in these spaces. It’s like a political expression of non-gendered performance that I think captures the best part of what Coachella is trying to be about.” He’s embracing “the mid-2000s Free People California aesthetic: dark colors, bohemian, everything is strappy and has a million rivets and cool hardware.”
Kendall Jenner at Coachella in 2016Bauer-Griffin - Getty Images
All that said, “Generally people are just trying to show off. This is a place where people are going to spend extra money on what’s happening now even if they know it’s a trend.” And he’s reconciling with that, as well. The night after he picked out outfits, he texted that “I feel like the challenge was balancing the schtick of Coachella or festivalwear with something that communicates your own personality. Like how do I find the ‘me’ but still remain in the sartorial world of Coachella?”
According to Rad, it is hard to escape that Coachella archetype. “The style in 2016 favored very little clothing and tons of accessories. With the environmental factors of the venue, this has stuck.” The festival, like seemingly everything today, is a product of the quickening celebrity and fashion trend cycles. “It’s definitely fun to indulge in this a bit; I’m able to wear pieces and outfits that wouldn’t fit the physical and environmental factors of other concerts, festivals, or even normal day-to-day activities at home,” she says. “But no matter what you wear, if enough people wear a certain item or style to Coachella, it becomes the ‘Coachella look.’”
There’s only so much flexing you can do when it’s 95 degrees outside; Capozzi just dyed his hair pink.
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