Vintage at Goodwood: the fashionable festival
It seems that every year a new festival pops up on the summer landscape offering music, camping and letting go of the mundane people we sometimes are Monday to Friday. But none of them really offer anything that different… until this year that is.
Here at Belle About Town we are a huge fan of retro and vintage and it seems that especially during a recession, many people long for a simpler time and therefore are reflecting on the joys of past decades.
Not least Wayne and Geraldine Hemingway, the co-founders and creative forces behind Vintage at Goodwood. The fashion designer couple have always been inspired by vintage and started out selling and customising second-hand clothes. From that spring the highly successful label Red or Dead.
With the help of Goodwood Estate owner Lord March, they have created a fashion and music lead festival that takes the best of British Cool from the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s and combines it into a sophisticated soiree that will see fashionistas, rubbing shoulders with rockabillies and seriously cool families too.
“Festivals have become all about 16 year-olds going out on the lash,” Wayne said. “Rather than stylish places, they seem to be places where you have to forget about your cultural DNA, dress down, get dirty, and after a couple of days, be desperate to get home.”
“We wanted to create an event where you could get dressed up, go to the coolest clubs, see the best films, eat at the nicest restaurants, where there were amazing fashion shows going on – all in a beautiful location.”
To do this they have built a mini city with pop-up shops that you can buy vintage clothes, salons to have hair and make-up done, places that will have catwalk show on and beautifully recreated café’s that you can sit in from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.
Music at the festival will reflect all eras with such luminaries as Faces, Sandie Shaw with Sophie Ellis Bextor and Mica Paris, Noisettes, The Damned, Buzzcocks, The Wailers, Puppini Sisters, Martha & The Vandellas, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Swing Out Sister and Heaven 17 to name but a few.
As well as stages for music performances they have recreated a Forties-style supper club with 30 piece orchestra, torch singer and burlesque dancers, a 50s style rock ‘n’ roll nightclub called Let It Rock, a replica of a mid-Seventies Mecca Ballroom and an Eighties roller disco. These will not only be nostalgic, looking back on what these eras had to offer, but also have modern music that has been influenced from these times.
And with so much going on across the weekend they of course offer camping, but even this is not as we know it. Vintage at Goodwood has taken posh glamping (glamorous camping) to a whole new level offering everything from pitching your own tent, Bellpads (pre-erected fully kitted out tents) and Podpads that you find at most festivals to stylish Hotel Bell Tents, Tipis, Geodomes and even Gypsy Caravans! What’s more they have gone luxury with the showers and loos too (Belles love porcelain), they’ve even laid down proper plumbing!
Lord March, owner of the Goodwood Estate said: “We have a proud history at Goodwood of introducing new, unique and well attended events to the calendar. Vintage at Goodwood is certainly in that tradition, and we are looking forward hugely to delivering both a festival and experience light years away from anything currently on offer anywhere in the world.”
So do we!!
Vintage at Goodwood starts today, Friday 13th August and runs until Sunday 15th August. Tickets are still available and range from £55 for a day ticket to £135 for the whole weekend with camping extra. For more information log on to www.vintageatgoodwood.com
