A full two years after Coachella became one of the earliest major music festivals to be canceled amid the spreading global pandemic, North America’s biggest multi-genre event finally kicked off April 15-17 with the first of two sold-out weekends in the scorching sun and throat-irritating dust of Indio, California.
You can read Billboard’s day one, day two, day three, and behind-the-scenes coverage. But there was also a lot of intrigue away from the Coachella website. Transportation and logistics issues at Revolve Fest, an invitation-only event for influencers and fashion bloggers, drew comparisons to 2017’s Fyre Festival after videos surfaced of attendees chasing shuttles and complaining of being forced to spend hours in the desert heat with little access to food or water to maintain.
Like Fyre Fest, which was an absolute disaster, Revolve, located three miles north of the Coachella music festival, soon sparked a viral reaction from its disaffected attendees.
Revolve Fest is the marquee for womenswear retailer Revolve, an online fashion brand founded in 2003 by co-founders Michael Mente and Mike Karanikola after the tech bubble burst in late 2000. The company is one of several hundred brands hosting unauthorized events aimed at Coachella-goers during the festival in Palm Springs.
Coachella organizers have few options to stop authorized events and will not dispatch their attorneys unless a brand is illegally using the festival’s name in any of its marketing or promotional materials. Sources say that since launching its event at the late TV host and media mogul Merv Griffin’s Palms Springs estate in 2017, Revolve has come as close as possible to crossing the line by drawing on its deep network of social media -leaning influencers to flood TikTok and Instagram with posts about its festival-centric clothing lines, drawing the festival’s online audience into Revolve’s own social media feed.
The company creates so much content around Revolve Fest that finding photos of the transport drama meant sifting through thousands of posts from influencers who had received tickets to attend in exchange for promising to increase the ratings for posts on social media to reach media from the event.
The posts created would then fuel a steady stream of Coachella fashion posts, created almost entirely by women, describing the various items that make up their outfit for the day. These videos were viewed more than 173 million times, according to TikTok, and generated 4.4 billion impressions in 2018 – five times more than the festival’s official fashion partner, H&M.
A Revolve representative told Billboard on Tuesday that when the festival was reaching capacity late Saturday afternoon, “shuttle access to the venue was limited to meet safety requirements, resulting in longer wait times for admission and resulting in… some guests were unable to attend the festival.” The representative added, “We sincerely apologize to all guests who were affected. We always strive to provide a great experience and we promise to make it even better.”
The event, which included performances from Jack Harlow and Post Malone and featured a special Spotify K-Pop Café, drew millions of eyes to the company’s social media pages. It was warmly welcomed by investors, who bought shares on Monday, boosting the company’s share price, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange, by 6%.
A version of this article originally appeared in Billboard’s latest Inside Track column. Read the article here.