BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY

Is it a coincidence that the free-flowing vibe of boho fashion is dominating the shops just as the summer festivals return in a riot of fun after two years of constraints? Jacqueline Wake Young thinks not

2022-07-02 -

It’s all Sienna Miller’s fault. She rocked up to Glastonbury in 2004 wearing Ugg boots with a studded belt over a tiered black dress and apparently we’ve never got over it. In that moment boho became de rigueur for a summer festival and secured its place in the mainstream. Now boho is never completely out of style and it is probably no accident that it’s currently everywhere just as the UK’s summer music festivals are returning with a bang.

Boho fashion has a relaxed silhouette and is characterised by floaty skirts and long dresses, furry gilets, embroidery, cardigans, slouchy bags and fringing, plus ethnic and paisley prints – but it is as much an attitude as a list of clothing items.

Short for bohemian, it’s about freedom, creativity and a rejection of the conventional.

What that means when trying to put an outfit together is that one should not try at all, but simply go with the flow, literally and metaphorically.

Sienna Miller insisted that she had put little thought into her Glasto ensemble.

“I think I’d just come back from travelling or something,” she said later, “Also, I did not start the trend.”

Model Kate Moss and singer Florence Welsh also put the look centre stage as did Jade Jagger who was described by Tatler as “the original boho”, although the daughter of Mick and Bianca said she was just putting things together in an “unexpected” way.

The historian A N Wilson argued that Winston Churchill, “in his dress-sense as in much else” was a “bohemian” after he arrived in Canada in 1943 wearing a natural linen suit.

Boho’s spiritual home was 1967’s Summer of Love, and it had a major moment in 1969 when Patrick Lichfield took a photograph of Talitha Getty on a rooftop in Marrakesh.

In the photograph that would later hang in the National Gallery, Talitha wore white harem trousers, white boots and a multicoloured coat while John Paul Getty Jr looked shifty in a hooded kaftan in the background.

Her wardrobe choices would later be described by the Sunday Times as “the luxe bohemian look”.

Ironic that the word bohemian should be associated with the wife of an oil billionaire, when it was originally used to describe those who eschewed wealth and convention in favour of a simpler, more frugal existence, even becoming, on occasion, voluntarily poor.