Who has snatched Coachella’s flower crown?

With Cowboy Carter riding high in the charts and everybody swooning over Beyoncé in her cowboy boots and Stetson, Coachella should have felt more relevant than ever. What is Coachella if not an odyssey of cowboy boots and Stetsons? And yet in influence (and influencer) terms, it tanked. Nobody really talked about it. Lots of influencers stayed away. My inbox was way less full of ‘get the look’ emails than in previous years, and there was scant media coverage in the UK. 

This in itself isn’t much of a story: its influence has been waning for a while. But if Coachella is dethroned, who else has snatched its flower crown? Answer: a furniture fair in Italy.

Last week’s Salone del Mobile in Milan ran parallel to Coachella, and was everything it wasn’t: nonchalant, low-key, and teaming with the sort of innately stylish people that wouldn’t dream of taking their cues from anyone as cringe as an influencer. With their passion for art and design, architecture and interiors, the SDM crowd are the antithesis of those who dress up and pose in front of a Ferris wheel.

Everything in their lives is stylish, from their crockery to their cushions. It’s all too innate for them to dream of posting a selfie. They simply don’t need the external validation. 

The current ambivalence towards Coachella is a reaction against being spoon-fed spurious trends. It’s a loss for fast fashion, and a win for clothes with meaning, be they vintage or designer, as well as a win for new and lesser-known niche labels, whose time is now.