Bodies in the Desert, Briefly Beautiful

Coachella exists as annual proof that beauty, money, and enough desert sun can temporarily convince everyone they’re living the life they’ve been staging for social media all year. The lineup is secondary. The real product is the fantasy of effortless cool—and the Levi’s Pool Party in Palm Springs that weekend was exactly that fantasy, compressed into a few acres of chlorinated water and curated hedonism.

Virgil Abloh was on the decks. This was 2017, a few years before he became Louis Vuitton’s menswear director and was fully canonized as the defining fashion figure of his generation—he was still the Off-White guy, still the bridge between streetwear and high fashion that everyone was trying to cross. Solange Knowles was there, Poppy Delevigne, a constellation of models and influencers who’d made the transatlantic pilgrimage to stand in shallow water and squint attractively into the California light.

What I find interesting about these satellite events is how nakedly transactional they are—a brand throws a party, the beautiful people show up and get photographed in the brand’s clothes, and everyone pretends it’s just a fun afternoon by the pool. Levi’s was celebrating their 501 Shorts that season, which is a little like celebrating the fact that water is wet. The 501 has been a festival staple for fifty years. It doesn’t need Coachella to validate it. And yet, there they all were, Abloh spinning, the guests glistening, the desert doing what deserts do in April—baking everything golden and slightly unreal.

Palm Springs has always had this quality. The mid-century architecture, the heat shimmer off the pavement, the sense that time moves differently there. You can be at a brand activation and still feel, fleetingly, like you’re inside a Slim Aarons photograph. That’s probably the whole point.