Some Things Not Welcome at a Summer Festival

With August fast approaching the summer festival season is in full swing. This week the offerings include Camp Bestival and the Cambridge Folk Festival whilst next week sees, amongst others, the Wilderness Festival at Cornbury. And that’s just the music festivals, there are also sports festivals, literary festivals, food festivals, garden parties, village fetes etc. Normally there is a typical English “live and let live” attitude because everyone’s out to enjoy themselves. But last week Bob Geldof decided to have a go at a crowd in Essex when he was performing with the Boom Town Rats at a family summer festival. He seemed to take offence that some in the crowd were dressed in Primark “This is a rock’n’roll festival. When you come to a rock’n’ roll festival you dress for a rock’n’roll festival,” Geldof is reported to have shouted at his audience. He went on to further endear himself to the local crowd “We are mega. And you are Brentwood. How do we know that you are Brentwood and we are mega? Because I am wearing a f**k off pretend snakeskin suit and [they] are wearing f**k off cowboy shirts even though they live in London.” If you don’t want to offend anyone the lesson is either to take more care of how you choose your festival gear or don’t start swearing at a family crowd for wearing clothes from the High Street.

Of course we are awash with plenty of advice on festival fashion. It’s usually aimed at young women but from Trendspotter we noticed some helpful fashion advice for men.  In fact music festivals have become a great place for fashion brands and others to pitch to young consumers by combining promotion with the latest technology. For the young tech-savvy audience, social media has been the key to enabling music fans to experience festivals vicariously through live Tweets, Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram posts, making shared music experiences even better. There are some interesting examples of how to commercialise a festival audience in this article from Australia. But a word of caution; its easy to offend accidentally if you are not culturally sensitive. So no Indian Headdress or sexist T- Shirts as explained in this article from Germany. Better play safe with our Summer Festival Funzee.