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

Behind the creation of the festival's most iconic and outrageous costumes – from wardrobe malfunctions to insider tips and viral sensations.

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.

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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">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });