Naomi's 2025 Coachella Recaps: Fashion
This is the 1st of 3 posts about my time at Coachella. It's all about my outfits for Weekend 1! if you're looking for a post about the music, stay tuned! For more on my trip to California, check out my travel blog, @naomitours
Well, another year, another weekend in the desert! 2025 marks my 4th year at Coachella, and my first really trying my hand at dressing up. There are those who love to complain about the rise of fashion at Coachella. They yearn for the days where it was an unpretentious rock festival and you could spend 80 bucks to go see Pearl Jam, live! But all things change, and Coachella has become a celebration of personal expression not just through music, but visual art and fashion, too! This was my first year with different outfits for different days, so read on as I discuss their design, function & tweaks I have planned for next year!
This year, my theme was magic as women's empowerment. Because throughout history, magic was the great equalizer that could make a women as physically strong as a man, leading them to fear certain women (witches) or revere others (angels, saints, martyrs etc.). My outfits also had a specific focus on wearable LEDs to illustrate the idea of magic! I'm a huge believer in the fashion potential of lights, and if I had my way it would be perfectly normal to wear them anytime, anywhere.
Day 1: Abracadabra: The Witch Returns to the Desert!
The history of witches is often one of backlash to women's efforts towards independence and equality. For instance, many persecuted in the Salem witch trials of colonial America suffered for defying strictly-enforced gender roles or seeking greater autonomy within society. This outfit is in some part a recognition of women's ongoing struggle for liberation, but it's also just a fun look that makes me feel beautiful. I would describe my fashion ideal as the intersection between good narrative and good aesthetics!
With Lady Gaga returning to the Empire Polo Field, I had to dress appropriately for her new single, "Abracadabra". The witch look is actually one of my oldest, I used to only do witch-themed outfits for Coachella, with my "Gen 1" LEDs, simple, non-programmable, warm white. This year I made a few changes, some small things like swapping the tights for regular socks for better ventilation (It was 101° that day, and that dress is black polyester!) Perhaps the biggest difference was the introduction of my "Gen 2" LEDs, which are programmable LEDs that can be any color. There's no photo of the nighttime outfit because I got too tangled and ended up snapping some of them, but there's a lot of potential in that functionality, including turning myself into the color of the set lights for the given song. I almost looked like part of the performance, which was super fun. My plan for the next version of the lights will have shorter strands to avoid tangling, I just have to figure out where I can comfortably hide the battery packs since they run off AA's.
Day 2: St. Naomi Descends to the Fields
Angels have a pervasive iconography in Western society, though their origins are hotly debated, perhaps even reaching back to Zoroastrian practices, while others suppose our imagining of humanoid angels comes from Byzantine Christian practices. I'm not a historian though, so I'll leave that debate to people smarter than me. Where we imagine angels as similar to women, they are flawlessly beautiful, and who wouldn't aspire to that?
This was my first year with an angel-themed outfit! When I was designing outfits, I spent a lot of time thinking about what would pair well with LEDs, while evoking the theme of the year. You can see my "Gen 1" lights here.They're a lot shorter and less complicated which makes them easier to operate compared to the "Gen 2", where you have to use (and keep track of) a remote. (They're also much more affordable!) I really like the warm white LEDs, there's something about it that feels holy and it was a nice surprise to match with the ferris wheel's lights!
As a queer woman, it felt very empowering to lay claim to the holy imagery of a faith that often marginalizes and excludes people like me. The outfit is itself a transgression, as if to say "Here I go, committing all manner of sacrilege to your sacred imagery, traipsing about the music festival and kissing whoever I like! There's real joy in that appropriation!
When it came to the dress, I opted to go more in the direction of ancient Greece, as I preferred what are frequently called "goddess halos" to the simpler and more cartoonish halo that angels commonly have. This turned out to be a problem at night when security confiscated it from me as they said it could be used as a weapon (even though they let me in with it twice before!)
A view of the halo at night, before I went back to camp for a sweater and it got confiscated coming back. I was delighted to see so much more light on peoples' outfits this year, and I loved that these two guys who dressed up in "honk-shoo" costumes, I hope they slept well! I'm also trying to look up and to the side, which angels seem to always be doing in old paintings.
I had wanted to wear white Chelsea boots to give the outfit a militaristic, army-of-the-lord feel, perhaps inspired by Angemon (you do, in fact, have to hand it to Digimon when it comes to outfits). Tragically, I couldn't find anything in my size that didn't take weeks to ship so I opted for comfort with white, slip-on sneakers and I'd never had such an easy day of walking around!
With this being the first year of the outfit there's lots to improve on, mainly reinforcing the cheaply-made angel wings I'd gotten as one of the straps immediately broke. I also want to embellish the design with a lot more feathers. I'm thinking maybe I could add more gold feathers to give it a more angelic impression, or alternatively add black wings to give the impression that I'm an angel beginning to "fall" into depravity, as Lucifer does in Milton's Paradise Lost. I need to figure out how to use a hot glue gun, so that's a skill I can develop. (It also gives me the chance to glue the lights to specific places, and to stick the switches to the inside of the wings behind my back, so you can't see them.)
I also want to change the halo to something that won't get confiscated, I'm mulling a laurel crown that fits in better with the antiquated feeling of the dress, It has the added benefit of being a lot more comfortable to wear, the headband gave me a headache eventually. I suppose I could be convinced to go towards something more "floaty" if I could make it more realistic, somehow.
Day 3: About the Author: Footnotes on Functionality
It's also at the back of the weekend, exactly how the "About the Author" section is at the back of a book. Now that's what I call narrative, baby! I've recycled different parts of the witch & angel outfits, see if you can pick out which parts!
Good fashion, like all good art, tells a story. As the coordinator of the outfits, I am their author. Day 3's look was born out of necessity: in other words, I knew I'd be sunburned and hungover at the end of the weekend, so comfort was queen! This outfit was low-key and designed to blend in with the crowd, a stark contrast from the rest of the outfits which were designed to stand out.
It was also an evolution in my own self-concept. I’d never been fully comfortable dressing up as a regular "festival girl", but 2025 was the year I finally was. Fashion has this power, to instill confidence. And one of my favorite philosophies of fashion comes from British designer Ossie Clark, who believed that where one feels confident, one feels beautiful!
A music festival is like a marathon, you have to pace yourself. It also pays off to try and minimize the small annoyances that can distract from such a special experience. There were many evolutions in my outfit that focused on functionality. Chief among these were the use of eyeglasses chains. Using these began out of the fact that I always lost my sunglasses at Coachella! I had resolved that this would be the year I broke the cycle, so I chained them up only to find that I quite like the way they looked. They lend a certain sophistication to the act of wearing glasses, and it's something different, which I always appreciate in a look. I ended up wearing them on my regular glasses as well!
Another benefit of the chain was that I could hook my earplugs case onto it with a carabiner, so that's yet another thing I successfully held onto this year!
I'm also very proud that I wasn't nearly as sunburned as I've been in past years, getting a parasol was a huge game-changer, as it allowed me to basically stand anywhere and not overheat. This was a necessity with the angel outfit, because I couldn't wear a hat with it, but it helped me on all the days! Also, don't forget sunblock, I would apply it generously before going in but only carried facial sunblock in my bag as I found I could avoid getting sunburned in sensitive places by covering up strategically. (Plus at Coachella they have sunblock stations you can use for free.)
Let's also not forget that the desert is extremely hot, so staying cool is essential to safety. I love my handheld battery fans, they made the difference in preventing overheating. I personally brought 3 hand-operated and a neck fan. Charge them when you can, but always have a spare in case one dies. It's even more important to stay hydrated. I recommend a CamelBak for both hydration and storage. Speaking of storage, this was my first year using a fanny pack, which was great to store my phone for all my outfits without pockets. That way, your hands are free to clap, hold a drink, etc.
Something people often neglect is the how cold the nights can get at shows, layering is key but usually it's best to go in with the sun up in your 'hot weather' outfit, then come back and change, even something as simple as adding a jacket or a sweater, before going back in to not be too cold.
Finally, It was really useful to have things to lay down on, whether that's a full-size picnic blanket for nighttime sets or a pashmina to wrap around my waist during the day. If I ever needed to rest I could find some shade and put it down to sit on until I was ready to move again.
The mountains viewed at dusk from the campground hill.
Coachella is fundamentally a celebration of our capacity for self-expression. What I find among the attendees are so many people living intentionally when it comes to art. People put a lot of time and effort into how they look, some see this as shallow but it's really just devotion to culture. Because culture is not some static, frozen statue. It is ever-changing and ever-evolving, and when you come to the polo fields, everyone puts their absolute best foot forward. It's the festival that does the most, but as a result, for two weekends in April, the world turns its eyes to Indio. I can't wait for next year 💛
