From Glastonbury to The Good Life
Jo Whiley in the Jo Whiley Scent Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2017.
Marie Kelly reflects on how generation festival became generation flower show.
For many 40-somethings, the filthy, sodden, booze-fuelled memories of noughties festival culture are some of their most treasured. All the more because the line between what they remember happening and what actually happened has blurred into a happy, nostalgic fog of warm beer, cold chips and sunken tents. Performances, too, are recalled with the same accuracy with which urinals were used at 2am, yet every woman remembers with pin-sharp clarity the clothes she wore to those raucous rites of passage. Whether travelling to Glastonbury, Féile, Oxegen or Dublin’s short-lived Love Box, the scarf belts, sequin tops, fringed waistcoats and denim cut-offs, which signified festival couture, were curated with the same precision previously preserved for honeymoon wardrobes. An equal amount of effort went into both, because the clothes you wore defined your festival-going credentials as much as the bands you supported. Jo Wiley, Kate Moss, Alexa Chung, Sienna Miller and Sarah Cox were the muses of the day, making festival chic as covetable as quiet luxury is today.
Now in their 40s and 50s, these former Glastonbury die-hards are more likely to be spotted at the Chelsea Flower Show than at Worthy Farm. Jo Whiley was chosen as an ambassador for the RHA last year and was one of five BBC radio DJs to have a garden named after her – The Jo Whiley Scent Garden. She showed up at this year’s event in a rainbow-coloured dress by offbeat Belgian brand Essentiel Antwerp, unintentionally twinning with the formidable Dragon’s Den judge Deborah Meaden. Far from being an embarrassing fashion moment, this unintended sartorial game of Snap only served to emphasise Whiley’s inimitable style credentials, as she injected the pretty sundress with a dose of contemporary cool, pairing it with chunky silver trainers (silver is the new white), layered necklaces and a Stine Goya fleece jacket.
Moss, meanwhile, the First Lady of festival cool, has embraced a softer, more ethereal style since launching her wellness brand Cosmoss last year, which offers skincare and wellness products inspired by plants and flowers in Moss’s garden. At every department store launch, she’s appeared in floral dresses and vintage-style maxis, extolling the virtues of balance and inner harmony, and reflecting a new, more wholesome direction for her personal brand. Those iconic images of Moss in Hunter wellies and hot pants, fag in one hand, plastic glass of beer in another, look like ancient history now. She may not have made an appearance at the Chelsea Flower Show yet, but the model confirmed in an interview with Desert Island Discs last July that she loves gardening and has permanently swapped a Primrose Hill townhouse for her cottage in the Cotswolds. Gardening seems to be the hook with which she’s reeling in the 40-plus customer base that has matured beyond the model’s former hell-raising ways.
Actress Sienna Miller, the woman whose elevated bohemian chic made her more famous in the 2000s than the Spice Girls, is now extolling the virtues of ‘cottagecore’, giving Architectural Digest a tour of her 16th-century Buckinghamshire home last year. She told the interiors bible that she cried when she saw the wildflower meadow in front of her house, created as part of the property’s renovation. It seems these famous dance-till-dawn Gen Xers have replaced Glastonbury with The Good Life. So too has former Irish top model Marie Staunton, who walked with Christy Turlington, Helena Christensen and Naomi Campbell at the Brown Thomas International charity Fashion Show organised by Ali Hewson in 1999. She’s now a trained horticulturist and spoke at Bloom last month about how to use food waste to cultivate a garden. You can catch her on Instagram in her stunning Malahide garden, advising followers on everything from caring for tree ferns to nurturing rhododendrons.
Finding your garden festival groove is a far more difficult proposition than kitting yourself out to camp out was 20 years ago. Back then, Topshop was awash with cheap, celebrity-inspired festival style and few were worried about either the ethics or the itch factor of fast fashion fabrics.
So are garden festivals the new music festivals for the over-40s? And if so, how do you dress for them? Chelsea and Bloom may be over, but there’s two more months of garden heaven spread out ahead of us, beginning with the annual Rose Festival in Dublin’s St Anne’s Park this month. Finding your garden festival groove is a far more difficult proposition than kitting yourself out to camp out was 20 years ago. Back then, Topshop was awash with cheap, celebrity-inspired festival style – few were worried about either the ethics or the itch factor of fast fashion fabrics – while H&M’s collaborations with the likes of Mathew Williamson and Roberto Cavalli perfectly hit the celebratory, summertime, shop-till-you-drop vibe that characterised the early-to-mid noughties. Forty-somethings these days have a far lower tolerance level for cheap fabrics and stealth production methods. They’re looking for quality and individuality, which is easier said than sourced.
Even more frustratingly, there’s no official – or unofficial – dress code for the likes of Bloom and Chelsea. Twenty years ago, festival chic was spelled out as clearly as each event’s line-up. You might think florals are the way to go when browsing a rose bed or Japanese garden, but every good outfit needs a hint of contradiction and a pop of irony – like Moss’s current crop of floral dresses. Most of them are semi-sheer, thereby negating any girlish or twee associations and giving them the same sex appeal as those vinyl pants she wore to Glastonbury in 2007. Plus, the floral tea dress and white trainer look, which has become as ubiquitous here in summer as orange palms and ankles, feels staid and obvious. It’s a generic answer to a personal question.
At Chelsea this year, Shirlie Kemp, formerly one half of eighties pop duo Pepsi & Shirlie, which sang backing vocals for Wham! in the eighties, wore white trousers with a white chunky trainer, finishing the look with a lilac blazer. The former singer, too, has swapped the high life for horticulture, regularly sharing images of her and Martin Kemp’s fantastical garden with her 191k followers on Instagram. Kemp chose an outfit that embraced her sugary pop roots, with its mix of clean-cut white and saccharine candyfloss shades, but she ensured the outfit had a grown up elegance by sticking to well-cut tailored pieces and pairing them with a modern, wear-anywhere trainer. She fully leaned into her pop culture persona, and it worked.
The trick to finding your over-40 style tribe is to look at the women you identify with and observe how they dress for summer festivals, be they garden, music or food. Both Jo Whiley and Deborah Meaden wore the same dress to Chelsea, but only one woman nailed garden festival sophistication. This is because Whiley nodded to her music DJ roots, with the psychedelic disco pattern of her Chelsea Flower Show dress and metallic trainers. She’s spent decades partying with rock stars and that’s as much a part of her DNA as the warm, throaty London drawl she’s recognised for on the airwaves.
Kildare Village personal shopper Jess Colivet agrees. The 57-year-old is one of the best-dressed women in the country. Although her music festival pedigree is patchy at best – “I think there was only one music festival in Ireland in the early eighties, in Lisdoonvarna, and my parents wouldn’t let me go to it!” – she’s an expert on the nuances of matching individuals, outfits and occasions. She’s a firm believer in putting your personality front and centre when deciding on a look. “I absolutely love the fun of dressing up for festivals like Bloom, Chelsea and Taste. But the challenge is choosing an outfit that’s both appropriate for the occasion and which reflects your own creativity and style.” She adds, “Each of us has to truly love what we wear and that comes down to feeling comfortable and confident in what we choose, and expressing that in our attitude.”
She suggests you begin with natural fabrics – they have better anti-ageing effects than any face cream – such as soft linens, crisp cottons or beautiful silks, which are cool and comfortable to wear and which instantly elevate an outfit. “For me, a classic look works best – a softly tailored linen jacket with wide-legged trousers and a crisp cotton shirt, paired with a flat Mary Jane mule from Nicky Hoyne, Wavie sandals from Clergerie or a platform trainer from Russell & Bromley. My personality is quite understated so this kind of easy tailoring always feels right.” For those who feel better in a dress, Colivet recommends Irish designer Aoife McNamara’s Ivory Dream dress or Roisin Linanne’s abstract print Rhode dress. The former is whimsical but modern, while the latter is bold and vibrant for women who like a sharp, slick aesthetic. A bag by August Night will add a finishing punctuation to any of these outfits, and if you’re a hat person, Colivet recommends the Collette straw hat by FAO Millinery.
Whether you’ve a head for hats or not, don’t forget your sunscreen – there’s nothing nostalgic about a festival farmer’s tan. Equally, while those three-day Oxegen hangovers might make for great dinner party conversation today, who over 40 wouldn’t rather a festival takeaway of pretty peonies or flowering cherry blossoms? Kate Moss for one, it seems.
This article originally appeared in the Sunday Independent Life, July 2023
