Niche or mass? A guide to festival marketing in 2025

H&M staged a 5,000-capacity festival in Downtown LA, just days before Coachella weekend one, to celebrate its Spring/Summer 2025 collection. The line-up featured Robyn, Doechii and Jamie XX, and all the dancers wore pieces from the edit. The audience was made up of well-known faces like Amelia Gray, Lisa Rinna, Dakota Fanning and Barbie Ferreira, plus international press (flown in for the occasion), alongside members of the public who’d signed up to an online ballot. These activations feel more aligned with a luxury brand event than a high street player, and perhaps are helping the retailer differentiate from members of the fast fashion cohort. The festival follows the blockbuster Charli XCX Brat concerts H&M staged in London and New York in late 2024, in the Copper Box Arena and Times Square, respectively, which garnered an “amazing” response on social media, according to H&M global creative director Jörgen Andersson.

“We decided we have a long history of working in the intersection of music and fashion, and today we know that intersection is more relevant than ever,” says Andersson. “I mean, music today is more fashion than fashion. We thought, what if we don’t just choose one big star like Charli, but we build our own line-up? We wanted to show our [range] with the curation. Music, like fashion, is not only about one genre, one style, it’s many styles, and it’s how you combine them and put them together.”

The dancers across the festival were dressed in pieces from H&M’s SS25 offering, which was inspired by LA in the ’60s. “After the event, I saw a TikTok of a girl who said it took her a few seconds to realise what she was actually watching was a catwalk expressed through dance,” Andersson says. “I think that’s the subtleness that you also want to have, that that that you want to say, how can we portray our clothes, our brand in a very contemporary, unique way?”

The Revolve Festival — which takes place adjacent to Coachella and has been running since 2015 — is arguably the blueprint for own-brand festivals. The 2025 edition featured performances from Lil Wayne and Cardi B, and drove $30 million in MIV, the highest of any brand at Coachella, per Launchmetrics. Celebrities in attendance included TikTok stars Charli D’Amelio and Alix Earle, plus Julia Fox and Blackpink’s Lisa. That said, Revolve has scaled back the size of the event in recent years, reducing capacity from 5,000 to 1,200 in 2024, “to save money for other activations” across the year, like the Miami Grand Prix, chief brand officer Raissa Gerona told Vogue Business last year. It has stuck to this smaller size (with approximately 1,500 guests this season) and has also pivoted the event to be more Gen Z focused since 2024, inviting more TikTokers as the Coachella audience changes and skews younger.