Glastonbury is 50!

The V&A is launching a seven-day digital celebration of Glastonbury to mark what would have been the festival’s 50th anniversary.

The museum, which is home to the Glastonbury archive, today launches a new collection on its website dedicated to the annual festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset. This weekend (26-28 June) would have been the 50th anniversary Glastonbury Festival.

The online exhibition will look at the festival’s inception, history, fashion, and stage design. It will include past posters, programmes, designs, interviews, film, photographs, backstage passes and other memorabilia.

The V&A continues to work with Glastonbury Festival to collect and archive material from each Festival.

Blue Man, early 1990s. According to the photographer, the man had used household emulsion paint. © Ann Cook

Bowie and Quintessence performed on the first Pyramid Stage in 1971. The 1971 Festival was captured on film by Nick Roeg and David Putman in *Glastonbury Fayre* (1971). The film is a great record of the Festival and reveals how it attracted hippies who identified with the counterculture movements that emerged in the late sixties. Sadly it does not include Bowie’s memorable performance.

Glastonbury Festival, 1970s. The hallmarks of the era – beaded necklaces, tie-dye, leather waistcoats, flower crowns, denim – continue to define what is ‘festival fashion’ today. Occasionally re-defined as ‘bohemian rock chick’ by the likes of Kate Moss, Alexa Chung and Sienna Miller, little has changed since the 1970s – including the festival presence of the ‘it girl’.

Festival Fashion

Jacket and trousers, worn by Roger Daltrey from The Who at the Isle of White Festival, 1969

The ‘festival fashion’ industry has only really existed since the mid-2000s, following several appearances at Glastonbury Festival by the model Kate Moss.

The height of her influence was in 2005, when she was photographed with her then boyfriend (and frontman of The Libertines) Pete Doherty. Her now-iconic look – tousled hair, gold dress, leather jacket, Hunter wellington boots and the ultimate accessory, an indie band boyfriend – suddenly decreed that festivals could be places for style and glamour, rather than just mud and mayhem.