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On Friday, outside Palm Springs, California, you might have thought a strange mirage had appeared: a million or two preteens descended on an arena, all wearing platform Doc Martens.
Had any official statement been issued, with a frequency that is undetectable for those over 25 years of age? Had everyone been unconsciously pushed to pair boots with fishnet stockings and leg warmers?
No one seemed to care that it was hot. What did matter was that the boots, punk symbols of past musical rebellions, were central to the unofficial but conspicuously official uniform of Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour, which began that night.
Every recent tour by a major pop star has seemingly generated an aesthetic microclimate that follows the artist from show to show, usually evaporating when the tour ends. Dressing up for concerts isn’t new—see Grateful Dead fans in their tie-dyed suits, ’90s Madonna fans in their finery—but last summer’s successful tours have upped the ante. Imagine showing up to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour without a cowboy hat or attending Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour without looking at least a little bit like a shiny disco ball.
These uniforms arise from fans’ desire to emulate their favorite artists and visually identify with each other. Now social media gives people the opportunity to share and see what everyone else has been using. And it doesn’t hurt that e-commerce sites like Amazon and Shein make it easy to order and receive a pair of sequined thigh-high boots in the time it takes Beyoncé to fly from Vancouver to Seattle.
For fans of Rodrigo, the current poet laureate of adolescent vulnerability, what was the look going to be? They arrived at the first stop of their Guts Tour world tour already dressed in unison.
In the parking lot before the concert, fans waited in long lines in every direction: for the merchandise truck, for VIP tickets, for porta-potties, each of which was a slow-moving parade. Purple was everywhere. Butterflies too. Many followed the singer’s example by being inspired by the riot grrrl and grunge fashion of the ’90s, like 14-year-old Lucy Elfelt, who gave her mother some advice on how to dress to emulate a decade that only one of they had lived.
“She told me, ‘Mom, you’re not grunge enough,’” said Alicia Elfelt, 49. “I’m like, my hair purple.”
The uniform evoked femininity strapped to combat boots, as if equipping its wearer for the rugged territory of emotional catharsis. There were plenty of feminine details like bows, corsets, and sequined miniskirts, but not without a chunky shoe or slimy eyeliner.
For some, perhaps it was a reflection of Rodrigo’s ability to transform the humiliations of adolescence into lethal songwriting weapons. “It’s like he read my diary,” Bridget Lee, 20, said of the artist’s songs about feeling naïve, ashamed, vengeful and insecure. “Every song is literally me,” said 19-year-old Diego Soriano. Others say they identify with her because he is a Pisces, because he is of Filipino descent, or because he gets angry about the same things they do.
“I love the way he screams,” added Val Mok, 28. “Like the story of my life.”
Ms Lee was wearing a Betsey Johnson tiered dress that she had found on the second-hand clothing app Depop, simply by searching “Olivia Rodrigo”. She and a group of nine other superfans had been planning her outfits in a group chat for months. Did you follow those social media accounts that breathlessly posted updates about every new tour product? They laughed. “Us are the accounts,” said one.
Many fans see Ms. Rodrigo’s fashion sense as flatteringly emblematic of Generation Z. But Tegan Astani, 18, said some students at her arts high school thought Ms. Rodrigo was “basic.” Whose music do they listen to in her place? They prefer lesser-known artists, Astani said: “Have you ever heard of Led Zeppelin?”
When the doors opened at 6 p.m., a parade of purple bows filtered into the sand. Natalia Adams, 20, sat between her parents, who marveled at the youth of the crowd. Her father, Matt Adams, 58, said there had been a long line to buy snow cones, but not to buy beer.
A few days earlier, when Ms. Rodrigo had released commemorative shot glasses for her 21st birthday, a user of X, formerly known as Twitter, responded who had never seen an Olivia Rodrigo fan of legal drinking age: “What are you going to have drinks of…juice???” It wasn’t an exaggeration: in the last row there was a 7-year-old girl with her ears covered by huge purple headphones.
When fans dress alike, how does one stand out? Ms Mok had built an entire ensemble around the artist’s lyrics “Coca-Cola bottles I only use to curl my hair.” Astani had sewn a cheerleader outfit based on a costume from Rodrigo’s music video for “good 4 u.”
Others were perfectly happy to dress like everyone else, to have a sense of belonging that both a fandom and a dress code can afford. Sometimes the push comes from above: Beyoncé even encouraged her fans to wear silver items on her tour. If Ms. Rodrigo didn’t offer such specific instructions, her Instagram posts of her and her pale purple merchandise offered clues to the type of look she was going for.
His fans turned out to have interpreted those clues correctly. When Ms. Rodrigo took the stage, she was wearing the same Doc Martens platform as everyone else.
“Did anyone dress up?” he asked a screaming crowd.