2014 Called, It Wants A Comeback

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The early 2010s changed how people interact with music festivals forever. It was the first time that you could experience the dirty glamour of the sweat and euphoria, the glitter and mud of a festival ground and then document it online. How you looked at a music festival suddenly mattered a whole lot more. Even now, 2024 festival fashion is playing with 2014, either embracing it, subverting it, or attempting to reject it entirely. But any way you spin it, the image of a 2014 festival outfit—the dip die, the flower crowns, the soft grunge hair, the fishnets—continues its haunt. The year 2014 was also an iconic time for pop artists like Lorde, Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, the XX, Lana Del Rey, and more.

Lana Del Rey is headlining Coachella this year, so festival fashion is total 2014-core. The anti-fashion fashion icon is the queen of dressing for nostalgia, and almost undeniably, the crowd will be wearing her baby doll dresses and wedding veils—tbd if we see any flower crowns, but there will definitely be bows. Summer 2024 fashion trends are in line with this: There are roses, bows, peplums, crochet, and at the same time, there’s a resurgence in club wear and messy makeup, leather boots, sexy clothes. The trends that led us into 2024 are leading us right back into the past.

“Everyone’s just craving the past,” stylist Chenelle Delgadillo said to StyleCaster. “Along with 2014-core, 2010 is also really big, like the era when people first got Instagram, they’re like using like the Valencia filter on their posts. I think it’s so fascinating, and I’m excited to see it at Coachella, where all the styles and trends in your face.”

Chenelle Delgadillo and her sister Chloe Delgadillo are a styling duo responsible for outfitting some of the biggest names in music right now, like Rosalía, Olivia Rodrigo, and others. They’re also the team who styled the Lana Del Rey x SKIMS campaign that dropped earlier this year. They worked with Pinterest to create a board of their Coachella inspo for 2024:

According to Pinterest, a lot of people are using the platform to plan their fashion, especially pertaining to festival season. People searching 2014 core a lot, in addition to Lana Del Rey Core, Coquette core, tulle, bows, crochet outfits, “goblincore,” corsets, and more.

It’s funny, the trend of naming fashion trends “cores” became popularized in 2013, with the term “normcore,” which was published in a trend report titled “Youth Mode: A Report On Freedom” by a trend forecaster called K-Hole. Previously, “cores” were primarily used to name music movements and subcultures. “If the rule is Think Different, being seen as normal is the scariest thing. (It means being returned to your boring suburban roots, being turned back into a pumpkin, exposed as unexceptional,)” the report says. “Which paradoxically makes normalcy ripe for the Mass Indie überelites to adopt as their own, confirming their status by showing how disposable the trappings of uniqueness are.” This observation from 2013 feels oracle-like, now that the online algorithms that make us feel unique and authentic are really priming us all into quirky uniforms.

Taking inspo from the past is obviously a tale as old as time. I don’t expect 2014 core to be totally groundbreaking, at least not in this iteration. Maybe when the 2010’s comes back in like 2074, when the 2010’s will be a decade remembered in ephemera and stories and museum placards, we’ll have something really interesting about the era to obsess over.