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10 Coachella Fashion Outfits Celebs Regretted Wearing

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Coachella turned into a runway years before anyone admitted it out loud.

By the mid-2010s, the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, wasn’t just hosting bands on the Sahara and Outdoor stages — it was hosting a full-blown celebrity style parade that got dissected online before the last set even ended. TheThings Celebrity’s rundown, “10 Celebrity Coachella Fashion Outfits,” revisits the desert looks that generated the most heat, from goth-glam sisters to a minimalist misfire that split fashion writers down the middle. Some of these outfits aged into iconic; others became cautionary tales stars would rather forget.

• Kendall and Kylie Jenner ditched the standard boho-festival uniform in 2014 for all-black gothic ensembles — oversized floppy hats, heavy dark layering, statement jewelry — a hard left turn from the crochet-and-flower-crown look everyone expected.
• That same 2014 weekend, Kendall Jenner was photographed alongside Selena Gomez cycling through denim cutoffs, boots, and bell-bottoms across multiple days on the polo grounds.
• Gigi Hadid’s stripped-down 2015 Coachella looks split commentators between “effortlessly minimalist” and “underwhelming,” proof that dressing down at the desert’s biggest fashion showcase carries its own risk.

The Jenner Sisters Go Goth

Coachella style in the early 2010s had a formula: flower crowns, fringe, maybe a headband borrowed from a Free People catalog. Kendall and Kylie Jenner blew past that in 2014, showing up in monochrome black — floppy wide-brim hats, layered dark fabrics, chunky statement jewelry — that read more nightclub than polo field. It wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t meant to be; the sisters were still building their own fashion identities separate from the Kardashian machine, and Coachella gave them a stage to do it away from a red carpet.

The gamble worked in the sense that people talked about it for years afterward, which is really the only currency that matters at a festival built on Instagram engagement. Whether it “worked” as festival fashion is a separate question — heavy black layers in 100-degree desert heat is a choice, and it was clearly a deliberate one.

Kendall Jenner and Selena Gomez Run the Weekend

Kendall Jenner wasn’t done experimenting once the goth moment passed. Across that same 2014 weekend, she and Selena Gomez — then one of pop’s most photographed young stars — rotated through edgy denim cutoffs, boots, and bell-bottoms, treating the festival less like a single outfit occasion and more like a multi-day style rollout. It’s the kind of approach that’s since become standard for A-listers at Coachella: pack for a runway, not a campsite.

Gigi Hadid’s Polarizing Minimalism

By 2015, the pendulum swung the other way for Gigi Hadid, who showed up in stripped-back, understated pieces that didn’t chase the maximalist festival aesthetic at all. Fashion commentators genuinely disagreed on this one — some called it a refreshing, effortless take that let her actual style speak instead of costume-y festival tropes; others found it flat and underwhelming for an event where showing up in anything less than a statement look can read as a miss.

Gigi Hadid’s stripped-down 2015 look left fashion watchers split between “effortlessly minimalist” and simply underwhelming.

The Vanessa Hudgens Controversy

Not every entry on this list is a matter of taste. Vanessa Hudgens’s recurring Coachella looks — bindi jewels, face paint, and Native American-style headdresses worn in earlier festival years — drew sustained media criticism for cultural appropriation, the kind of backlash that outlasts the festival weekend itself. It’s the same conversation that’s followed plenty of other celebrity fashion moments since, from later controversial celeb moments that fans wouldn’t let go to festival dress codes that now explicitly discourage sacred religious or tribal regalia as costume. Hudgens’s headdress phase became the go-to reference point whenever Coachella style debates flared up again.

What ties all ten looks together in TheThings’ countdown isn’t just the outfits — it’s the pattern. Celebrities at Coachella are dressing for a photo that will outlive the festival by years, and every choice, from the Jenners’ gothic layers to Hadid’s bare-bones approach, gets graded in that permanent record whether the star wanted it or not.