Coachella looks from Lady Gaga to Sabrina Carpenter – and the costumes that can make or break careers

Lisa recently had a broken corset strap. The K-Pop superstar and White Lotus cast member was waiting to greet fans at her Los Angeles hotel, but one wrong step outside her suite, and suddenly it wouldn't have been a photo opportunity – it would have been a serious wardrobe malfunction. "I always put a back-up corset in the Uber with me," Genesis Webb, the fashion director for pop star Chappell Roan and one of Lisa's main style advisors, tells the BBC. "It's the number one rule of styling a music artist: anything can happen." 

As artists like Lisa, Lady Gaga and Charli XCX descend on the Palm Springs desert for Coachella's 26th annual Music and Arts Festival, they bring with them an elite team of creative directors and fashion experts whose visual creations can make or break their performances. "How an artist dresses at Coachella can be a monumental tool for establishing their identity, or reinventing themselves," says Tomás Mier, a Rolling Stone music critic and staff writer. "Look at what Sabrina Carpenter was achieving last year onstage. The babydoll dresses, the big blonde hair, the pastels – using that iconography onstage was impactful in creating a global hit, which created her career as a pop star." Meanwhile, says Mier, an unfocused or "chaotic" outfit can lead to online mockery, or worse: "If people don't want to look at you onstage, they'll just stop paying attention. That's the kiss of death for a pop star's career."

For emerging artists aiming for stardom, getting fashion right can have immediate benefits. Witness Chappell Roan, who arrived at last year's Coachella festival as an underground indie singer and left a newly crowned star. "She had a cult following, but she wasn't mainstream by any means," says Webb. "We knew audiences still had to 'meet' her, and we knew that style could help define her to the world." Webb commissioned the California costume shop Jackalope Land to make a giant beaded butterfly suit for the singer, which soon became a viral sensation. "Everybody knew who she was after that. People still wear the butterfly outfit as a Halloween costume. That's how you know you've done your job."

Despite the high stakes of an artist's signature concert look, time to make it is often short. "By the time you get through creative inspirations, logistics and budget, you're looking at three weeks from final idea to performance," longtime creative director for Missy Elliott, June Ambrose, tells the BBC. The costume designer and fashion director is responsible for some of music's most indelible imagery, from Elliott's 1997 inflatable suit for the video of The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly) to her couture-tailored tracksuit at the 2003 Grammy Awards.

Elliott's 2024 Out of This World tour featured more than 250 costumes covered in half a million rhinestones, many of which will make an appearance this weekend at Coachella. Ambrose is also creating an extra three looks for the hip-hop star. All of the elaborate looks will be towed into the desert by a tractor-trailer before the show, along with new looks for the dancers and special-effect fabric that makes the entire show cast appear soaking wet, even in the bone-dry Coachella Valley.

Why so much investment in the clothes themselves? "From inception, Missy's always been an individual type of artist," says Ambrose. "She's remade hip-hop culture, and been brazen about redefining what women in the space look like." Ambrose says Elliott sees her concerts as "full experiences" that align with Broadway musicals or blockbuster films. "We develop the show with a three-act structure. We have a narrative; we have characters. The costumes translate Missy's songs into visuals. They express the same energy and emotion as the music, and help Missy get into character on-stage." They also serve as memory markers for the audience, giving them simultaneous visual and audio cues that can embed more deeply in the brain, allowing Elliott's musical canon to hang out in their heads rent-free. "We consider it a real challenge because Missy's been an iconic performer for so long," says Ambrose. "Now, we keep asking ourselves, 'How do we raise the game? What else can we try?' The goal is to show them something they've never seen before."

Cultural moments

Like Elliott, Beyoncé used style to help convey a narrative, during her famous Coachella set in 2018. Instead of her usual arsenal of stunning couture gowns and crystal-studded leotards, she teamed with stylist Marni Senofonte to present more unexpected archetypes – the Egyptian queen Nefertiti, historically black collegiate sorority members, and even Tibetan monks.

To create the show-stopping numbers, Senofonte worked with Olivier Rousteing from Balmain, who is currently the only black womenswear designer at a major luxury fashion house. In combining the heavy and elaborate costumes with the masterful, lighter-than-air choreography, Beyoncé admitted in the 2019 Netflix documentary Homecoming, "I definitely pushed myself further than I knew I could."

"She raised the bar in a way no other artist has come close to reaching," says Mier. "And she did it through the visuals. That's the epitome of using Coachella for your artistry through fashion."

Sometimes, an artist uses their concert style to get personal with her audience. Take Megan Thee Stallion, whose 2025 Coachella set traced her trek from aspiring Texas rapper to global superstar, using fashion as signposts along the way. To represent her early years on the Houston rap scene, stylist Eric Archibald found pieces from the artists youth, like "old-school Citizens of Humanity denim" in bright colours that pop on stage. As the show progressed into Megan Thee Stallion's later albums, her outfits changed to reflect her success, with leather, faux fur and custom couture pieces from Paris ateliers like DSquared and Off-White. "It's such a big moment that we have everything custom-made," Archibald tells the BBC. "The clothes really help the audience go on the journey with her during the show. They see where she came from and where she's going. It's truly like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It's gorgeous, and very moving."

Physical movement counts as much as emotional whirlwinds. During a performance, artists are on-stage for up to three hours, often performing full dance routines and powerhouse vocals while navigating moving light rigs, constant set changes, and costume swaps timed to the millisecond. When hair artist Danielle Priano created the beachy waves for Sabrina Carpenter on Saturday Night Live, she brought more than a dozen cans of the right hair product to ensure the pop star's hair had enough movement to look natural, but enough shape that even in high-contrast video Carpenter's signature bombshell style was unmistakable.

"They say TV adds 10lbs (4.5kg), but TV screens and concert jumbotrons [large, hi-res video screens] actually thin out the look of hair. That's why 90% of pop stars use hair extensions," says Priano, who also creates hair looks for Rosé, Mariah Carey and Lisa. Priano says artists like Carpenter request to wear their hair down during concerts because "it becomes part of the act – they toss it around, they use it to accentuate the choreography. It completes their character on-stage". At least a month of prep time is required to order, dye and curl the hair extensions so they're an exact match for the celebrity. Then Priano arrives between three and six hours before showtime to ensure they're perfectly placed. "I had a celebrity call me once, asking if I could work with her. She told me that during her last big tour, her hair extensions began to fall out of her head. She pulled it into a ponytail herself between songs and made it look like a costume change. She needed someone who could handle that type of craziness, because things always go wrong."

"My motto is, 'always have a solution before there's a problem,'" says Ambrose of Missy Elliott's elaborate costumes. "For quick changes, we've done drills, and the wardrobe crew, they're superheroes. They can pull it off in under a minute." To make movement around the stage easier, Ambrose enlisted Timberland designer Tadd Smith to create super-high work boots made with eight layers of stacked soles. "We cored out the interior of the leatherboard and inserted foam to reduce weight," says Smith. To help shield Megan Thee Stallion's face from Coachella's notorious gusts of wind, Archibald commissioned a custom-made cowboy hat from Stetson that recalls her cowgirl roots, along with hand-carved leather boots that allowed the artist to navigate the desert's dust and sand.

But sometimes, says Webb, "the costume is more important than the comfort. They know what they're getting into. They're pop stars. This is what they train for." She cites Lisa and her former bandmates in the K-Pop sensation Blackpink as a prime example. "The discipline and the knowledge needed to work in that world is militant. It's incredible. You ask Lisa how she wants to look, and she can tell you exactly what she wants already. I just bring in my own feelings about the clothes, and that's when we get to have fun."

She also brings in an extra corset – just in case. 

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