Imagine this: your favourite singer announces a stop in Singapore, and you’ve spent all morning ignoring calls at work camped out on the ticket website to catch a pair of tickets for your friend and you. Once they’re sorted, she sends you a ping on Telegram that reads, “What do we wear?”.
You pull up TikTok, where videos of concertgoers in other cities are showing off their stadium fits. You screenshot a few references and send them back to the group chat. Then, in a stroke of well-timed coincidence, an ASOS mailer slips into your inbox, and both your friend and you head over there to start adding some items to your cart.
As social media’s sway on the way we dress only gets increasingly bigger, it’s become commonplace to see endless videos of Harries dancing in pink feather boas or Blinks in head-to-toe black and pink. Take the recent Born Pink concert by Korean girl band Blackpink, which took place in May of this year in Singapore. For a whole weekend, you could throw a stone and hit ten people decked out in some variation of black, pink or both. This writer was equally guilty, having fished out a black T-shirt and a pink shirt I bought for Chinese New Year years ago, before taking some scissors to an old pair of black jeans. Pink socks and black boots topped it all off.
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That was the best look I could throw together in a short amount of time – a grunge-inspired outfit that if I wore anywhere else, I’d look like a style wreck. And yet, amidst the sea of pinks and blacks, I felt completely at ease. My friends and I bonded with another group of girls over their bedazzled lightsticks and neon pink graphic tees. Fast forward to a fortnight after, and I was scrolling through TikTok when I came across an interview piece where fans of Blackpink were asked what they were wearing. The amount of “I just bought this on Shein” in that video was shockingly repetitive.
Swifties – such as these ones at Taylor Swift’s Eras concert in Nashville, Tennessee in May – often turn up in something sparkly and shiny to emulate their idol’s style.
We all know and have heard the effects of fast fashion umpteen times that we could probably recite it all from memory, but when it comes to concerts or music festivals, it’s like we’ve hit with a sudden moment of memory loss as we cart out boxes and boxes of new threads to wear to see our favourite artists.
There’s something to be said about the community spirit in concerts. When everyone gets the proverbial fashion memo, it’s a marvel to see a stadium full of people dressed in elements that are so similar, and yet look completely different from one another.
In the case of Blackpink’s Singapore tour, there were cottagecore girls in pink crochet knits, grunge groups in torn denim and combat boots, and even a guy dancing in pink fairy lights. Even at Harry Styles’ Love On Tour concert earlier this year, there were pink feather boas and cowboy hats, but the way people remixed these elements with their own styles were fascinating.
Concert fashion sometimes feels almost like looking in a petri dish through a microscope. At first glance, everyone looks the same. It’s only when you zoom in closer that you begin to see all the different personalities in the crowd. There are so many points of uniqueness that make the experience of people-watching truly entertaining. Perhaps, that’s the joy of dressing up for a concert: to feel a sense of community and togetherness because we’re able to identify with a group of other fans.
Still, this doesn’t help with fashion’s already gargantuan impact on the environment.
Fast fashion has always operated on a “more is better” basis, churning out new products at breakneck speed for low costs. This, in turn, offers an endless supply of new clothing that feed into our throwaway clothing culture. With concerts only dialling up in the months ahead – Coldplay and Taylor Swift are on the local roster, and globally, Beyonce and Lizzo are holding sold-out tours internationally – the throng of fans rushing out to stock up on Eras-approved rainbow dresses or Renaissance-mandated sparkly blazers is only going to increase.
These same rainbow dresses and sequined blazers that served us well for a day will inevitably sit in our wardrobes, as we struggle to find more use for them. Over time, as the memory of the concert highs fade, so will their significance. Eventually, they’ll end up in the pile of clothes to be disposed of. Not to mention, social media has encouraged a culture of never repeating outfits, so even if we wanted to reuse that rainbow dress, we’d pass it over for something that hasn’t been on our Instagram feed yet.
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Never mind that in 2019, a Censuswide study found that single-use festival outfits accounted for US$307 million (S$406 million) or translated to 7.5 million outfits that were only worn once. Or that in the same survey, one in four participants felt embarrassed wearing an outfit to a special occasion more than once. Never mind that just last year, in the United States alone, 11.3 million tonnes of clothing are thrown away annually, roughly equating to over 2,000 clothing items tossed every second.
And – as if these facts weren’t disturbing and dystopian enough – we are now partying next to a growing desert dump of clothing. In May of this year, a mountain of leftover clothing in the Chilean desert grew so big that it can be clearly seen from space.
So, what can one do? Does this mean we should sacrifice dressing up for concerts for good? It’s entirely possible to still rep concert fashion without contributing to the already-dire environmental situation. Here are a couple of ways.
