During Coachella 2018 (a.k.a BeyChella), Hailey Bieber made headlines for her perfectly curated festival fit. During weekend one of Coachella 2024, Bieber made headlines for putting a joint in her viral Rhode cell phone case.
Bieber’s transformation is emblematic of this year’s Coachella vibe: messy, chaotic, fun, and—for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic—relevant.
Of course, Bieber and all the other girls still brought their A-game fashion wise, and the festival itself has not changed in any meaningful way. It’s the vibe that has shifted, and honestly, thank God.
Just look at everything that happened during week one. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are just running around hand in hand, going to shows, making out, and chilling. Like, I know her bodyguard is there, but have we ever seen Blondie look so free? She’s wearing backward baseball hat! She’s taking photos with Teresa from RHONJ!!! He’s playing air guitar with one hand and holding on to her with the other! He’s lifting her up in the air, homecoming queen style!
But even if Traylor didn’t grace us all with enough content to feast on for a millennia, we would have enough empirical evidence to declare that Coachella Is Back. There’s Bieber, posting her phone case pic. There’s her husband, Justin, rocking out to Ice Spice and hopping onstage to casually perform with Tems. There’s Billie Eilish making out with YouTuber Quenlin Blackwell and Evan Peters making out with a ~mystery woman~ to Lana Del Rey.
What do these things all have in common? They are fun! They are carefree! They are—and this is important—apparently noncurated.
Also, the performances this year have a certain…energy. Let’s start with Renee Rapp, whose entire set was one viral moment after another. To start, she brought out the cast of the seminal lesbian pop culture touchstone The L Word to introduce her, which is just honestly inspired. Then she brought out Kesha to perform “TikTok”—and gave her the space to correct the record on a certain alleged criminal.
“KESHA JUST CHANGED THE LYRICS FOR TIK TOK TO “FUCK P DIDDY” AT COACHELLA WITH RENEÉ RAPP OH MY GODDD,” one person on X put it, with just the right amount of enthusiasm.
Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
It’s not just Kesha, though. At Coachella 2024, literally anyone could pop on the stage at any moment. Will Smith performed “Men in Black” onstage with J. Balvin. Do I have any idea why he did this? No! Did it make any sense to me? Absolutely not. Did it make me laugh when I saw the headline? Yes, it did!
All of this is to say, we are so back. In the mid-2010s, Coachella became an interesting cultural phenomenon, at least online. The music festival itself has been going on since 1999, but it took on a different relevance once we all got social media and the influencer industry began to take off.
Suddenly, Coachella wasn’t just a fun party and music weekend—it was a runway. Influencers flooded into the festival hoping to get attention and followers by being seen, and brands followed suit. Perhaps the biggest harbinger of this was the “Revolve Fest,” held by the clothing brand during the festival starting in 2016. Revolve Fest became the biggest influencer event of the year, attracting 5,000 at its 2022 peak according to Business of Fashion and helping to create “influencer marketing as we know it.”
But as the festival became more of a social media marketing event, some people began to complain that it also became less fun. They grumbled that influencers had “ruined” the event, that all the businesses flooding in to try to market themselves had both made the festival annoying to attend and less authentic of an experience (notably, BoF reports that Revolve Fest was much scaled back this year). The pandemic, which led to cancellations of Coachella in 2020 and 2021, certainly didn’t help the flagging momentum. Ahead of the festival’s first weekend, CBS News reported it was seeing the slowest ticket sales in decades.
“The three-day high of hedonistic escapism seems to be a thing of the past,” wrote one self-proclaimed Coachella “superfan” for Business Insider last year.
But maybe everyone was wrong. We wrote Cool Coachella’s obituary, and then the celebrities decided to act up, be weird, and just have fun. It’s the fact that none of this seems curated for Instagram that makes it all so delightful (I say seems, Taylor does have an album coming out on Friday, after all).
So, who’s ready for weekend two? For the first time in years, I am genuinely excited.
Stephanie McNeal is a senior editor at Glamour and the author of Swipe Up for More! Inside the Unfiltered Lives of Influencers
