Coachella has become more focused on the material aspects of the festival rather than the music itself. Influencers have been a driving force of this as they take sponsorships to be there. This means that they are obligated to focus on the brand that has invited them, leading to them talking more about the brand than the music.

This is obviously not the case for every Coachella goer, not all of them are influencers, but they will all be, to some extent, influenced by what they see. A large example for this is the style of clothing at Coachella. It has been normalised to plan outfits months in advance.

Some brands have even created festival clothing lines, which furthers the need for people to have new clothes for every festival they attend. This can be seen as a part of a wider trend in consumerism where people are buying more clothes and wearing them for less time, causing more waste. This clothing shift is due to influencers convincing people more than ever that it is something shameful to wear an outfit more than once.

This gets exacerbated for festivals because of the constant pressure to post our lives on social media. This can be seen in the picking up of the term ‘influencer olympics’ by social media to describe the festival. They all feel a need to outdo each other leading to more extravagant clothing, more brand deals, more unnecessary items in their tents when they camp.

All of this creates an ecosystem of waste that is extremely damaging for the environment. Coachella does have prompts for how people could be more environmentally conscious, however that does not seem to be enforced in a meaningful way. Comparatively, Glastonbury Festival has been taking initiatives to lower the waste that is left behind, including using compostable packaging.

There is still an environmental impact of the festival as not everything can be fully prepared for, and people will still leave waste no matter what it is. However, they are still doing more than Coachella when it comes to reducing the environmental impact. This could be because Glastonbury Festival is not as influencer focused as Coachella.

As much as people go and dress up for the clout of the festival, Glastonbury is still mostly about the music, not social capital. The waste that is produced by festivals seems to be a universal issue as it is difficult to police but there is a very distinct difference between festivals that try to mitigate the issue and ones that do not. Even Burning Man, a festival that already creates a large quantity of carbon emissions, and creates waste, has a sustainability plan.

Burning Man has also entered the influencer sphere but not in the same way as Coachella. It seems no other festival is viewed on social media like Coachella is. This could be due to its roots in more alternative fashion which drove a specific Coachella look.

This type of look seems to be sanitised as companies fight to sponsor influencers, but it still leads to people thinking that Coachella is different and therefore justified in its over consumerism, which keeps getting worse each year.

Coachella produces 107 tonnes of daily waste, of that amount only 20% gets recycled