Reasons to love: Festival fashion

After just returning from my personal favourite festival of the year (LEOPALLOOZA - a boutique festival, close to my home-town), I've been considering my love of 'festival fashion'. I think the main reason its so admired is the way it creates a whole unique style of its own by incorporating a broad range of peoples different approaches to current trends. I am pretty sure I've read that annual music festival Coachella has a lot of impact over the styles that will be available for months afterwards - high street and designer. 

Here are my reasons for being such a festivalfashionlovingfreak. 

1 - If your doing the festival thing properly and staying for a few days, you probably won't be able to wash. Bit of a strange reason without explaining myself, so that's what I'm going to do... (Explain myself). Basically no few day festival would be half as trendy without the three day mud build up on the Hunter wellington boots, random splashes of mud on waterproofs/skin/hair/clothing and (this is the best one) a wide array of gorgeous headbands cleverly used to decoy the look of greasy hair. 

2 - After about 5pm people are usually pretty drunk and care less about what they look like, which in turn makes them look cooler and more fashionable. 

3 - Whatever style you opt to incorporate into your festival outfits - it always looks relaxed and effortless. Particularly when in Great Britain as people will be wearing baggy clothes in the rain or baggy clothes in the shine... Clearly it wasn't just Madness who loved 'Baggy Trousers'.  

4 - There is no gender, age, race, size or shape discrimination when it comes to festival style. Anyone and everyone can do it and generally look cool! 

5 - ROCK vs POP. Some how the mix of leather, denim, studs, feathers, shorts, bikinis, army boots, wellies... (No this isn't fifty shades of grey)... The mix of pop and rock fashions mixed together work perfectly... In a way they have never worked together before!  

Grunge fashion - Do or die?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dephisticate

However cool the grunge look is, I can't seem to get my head around it. I spend hours upon hours trawling through pictures of celebrities on the internet and its safe to say some of the people I envy most are the ones who are able to pull off looking like a corpse. The black leather, studs, baggy tees and rips all look super cool in my imagination, but in reality can sometimes lead to people looking like a dancer from the 'Thriller' music video. 

Just think Taylor Momsen, from Gossip Girl, she looks great with her stacks of black eye liner but it must be a serious commitment to devote yourself to that kind of extreme look everyday, I hate to imagine how panda-esque her eyes would be after forgetting to take off her make-up before bed! It doesn't only appear to be a grave effort make-up wise, after the release of her band Pretty Reckless's debut single, named the ever so jolly, 'Makes Me Wanna Die' she appears to have gone into hibernation. The disadvantage of the grunge group, other than the eye bags, is that you can only venture out at night and have to appear aloof and mysterious at all times. It all seems too much of an effort to me. 

Saying all this, the late Amy Winehouse had oodles of style, the way in which she mixed grunge with vintage/retro style was very clever indeed, this allowed herself to create her own iconic image. The way she mixed her tattooed arms and thick black beehive with girly floaty vintage dresses screamed post-modernism and was enough to make any fashionista weak at the knees! All with a feline felt tip eye liner flick! 

However for now I think I'm going to stay away from the 'Thriller' look... The nearest I'll be going to that is next Halloween, though then hopefully no-one will recognise me!