Caitlin Moran: let’s all dress up and go wild

‘WHY we should all be awesome, unique, shiny, ridiculous – once a year’

Caitlin Moran. Picture: Mark Harrison

I ALWAYS marvel at how they do it. At the sheer force of will involved. The first few hours at a festival require one to be a plodding, stoic beast of burden. Tent, roll mat, sleeping bag, stove, fold-up chair – these must be carried, on your back, from a car park to a campsite far, far yonder. Beans; rum; wellies; more rum – your mortal needs weigh you down.

A mile into your trudge – going up a hill, in the rain – you come to really hate your mortal needs. Your tins of beans are so heavy. You hate your beans. Why do so many people take drugs at festivals? Because they’re lighter than beans. Oh, the beans! And still so far from the campsite! You might leave some of the beans here, on the path. You can just not eat on Saturday. It seems excessive to have food every day. Only boring people eat regularly!

The beginning of a festival is like a massive metaphor: every bit of fun you’re going to have over the weekend must, first, be paid for in sweat and pain, as you bring it on site. You get the invoice at the beginning of the event. You choose every gram wisely.

And yet – even with space in their bags at a premium, desperate to strip their belongings down to a bare, starving minimum – there are people who dress up. People bring amazing outfits to festivals. By which I mean huge and heavy. Full-length wedding dresses. Velvet robes appliqued with stars. Frida Kahlo. World War II Wrens. A bear.

I once met three women who had come as a full English breakfast – respectively, fried egg, a sausage and a slice of toast.

“We have to stay together at all times,” Toast told me, sombrely, as we queued for noodles, “because when Sausage is on her own, people read her incorrectly and think she’s a willy.”

At this year’s Green Man festival, in Brecon, Wales, I sat high on a hill as the sun set, and observed this year’s trends for festival dressing. Ten years ago, it was all fairy tutus – for women, children and men – and floral crowns. They, clearly, are over. The fairytale is dead. In colder, harsher 2018, it’s all about Nature v Technology; it’s all about animals v lights.

I would say around a fifth of the audience had come as some kind of animal: in a penguin onesie; face-painted as a tiger; or, in the case of one man, wearing a gigantic cat’s sleeping igloo, shaped like a cat’s head, on his own head.

Tails were everywhere – hundreds of women had sprouted fox tails, which they were swishing jauntily. I admired the biological knowledge that had gone into one woman’s sequined lizard tail, which she would periodically undo and let drop to the floor, while running away and shouting: “I felt threatened in that situation!”

And when it came to technology, recent advances – you can get a string of battery-operated LED lights for just £3.99 – meant that everyone could now look like a Christmas tree, a wink of fireflies, Paris. I barely need mention those who were simply wearing 20 multicoloured lights as a necklace, at dusk, or who had garlanded them on their heads, for the woman who had stuffed her thin white bomber jacket with them, so she looked like the aurora borealis on legs, needs more urgent credit.

The winner, perhaps, was the man – 70, easily – who strode elegantly around in a red smoking jacket and cravat, with a tasselled lampshade on his head. The lampshade was fully operational. One could have stood next to him, at midnight, and read a book. I imagined him and his wife packing the car for the weekend. “Tent? Walking stick? Medication? Multicoloured light-up lampshade and smoking jacket? Let’s go!”

As I sat there with my cider, I wondered just what it is that makes people go to such effort – for everything, at a festival, is an effort. Who would forgo an extra blanket, on the chilly nights, or several bottles of wine, in favour of stuffing their rucksack with a gigantic full moon made of foam rubber, so they could walk around with it on their head, shouting, “I’M WAXING RIGHT NOW!”.

And then I realised that, in fact, it is the release from effort that makes people carry these outfits for miles.

All the rest of the year, in every other place, we must be a combination of
any of the following: smart, aspirational, sexy, powerful, fit, appropriate to our
age, gender and status. Dignified.
Co-ordinated. Formal. The crease in the right place, and the eyeshadow blended so, and the shoes polished until they shine.

But here, it’s a different lexicon entirely. Here, you can be jolly, awesome, unique, ridiculous, confusing, adorable, shiny ... luminous. Compared with the weight of being “correct”, a tail, cape or lampshade, wedged into a rucksack, is no weight.
No weight at all. You’re just carrying a bubble of joy.

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