Getting to Coachella

There’s this moment every year where the entire fashion world just stops and turns toward the desert. Coachella has become something beyond the festival—it’s a destination myth, the place where you’re supposed to matter. Being there only means something once you’re photographed being there.

Alexander Wang understood this completely. So he loaded the new Adidas collection into a van with a few models—Lexi Boling, Binx Walton, Issa Lish, Hanne Gaby Odiele, and the rest—and drove them through the Colorado desert toward the festival. Roadtrip as advertisement, landscape as backdrop—the whole machinery visible but still somehow seductive.

The desert works because it works. You could put anything there and it would start to matter. There’s something about bleached earth and open space, the way light behaves when there’s nothing else around. Put beautiful people in good clothes against that emptiness and they seem to stand for something larger than themselves, which is the entire point. Fashion exists in that gap between what something is and what it looks like.

What gets me is how the whole thing manages to be both completely constructed and still seductive. The models trying to look effortless while someone documents every moment. The van as both vehicle and set. It’s the opposite of a real road trip but shot to look exactly like one. You’re performing casualness at a professional level. Six hours from destination and you’re already arrived.

By the time they reached Coachella, there was nothing left to discover. The campaign had already said everything—that they were the right people, in the right place, at the right moment. The clothes were just the language for saying it. That’s what they were really selling.