We ship Worldwide,
Choose a popular currency:
Coachella 2026: Latex, leather, lingerie, cowgirls & a Bad Angel
COACHELLA 2026: LATEX, LEATHER, LINGERIE, COWGIRLS & A BAD ANGEL
Coachella 2026, which took place this month over its now-traditional pair of three-day weekends (April 10-12 and 17-19) at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, continues to grow in stature as a combined music festival and attention-seeking fashion parade.
Notable in recent times for facilitating eye-catching kink/kink-adjacent looks both on and off-stage, it takes place when hot weather is pretty much guaranteed, which can result in some pretty creative approaches to wearing edgy fetishy fabrics while still exposing as much flesh as possible to the sun.
If you believe Google’s April 24 AI overview of this year’s event (full title: The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival), “leather and latex dominated the fashion trends” there, marking “a shift toward bold, structured and ‘saucy’ looks in the desert.” Which — judging from the plethora of photos and videos now posted online of performers, guests and ‘ordinary’ audience members — was at least partially true.
There was a lot of lingerie worn as outerwear. In the best examples — such as Sabrina Carpenter’s sheer black lace Dior bodysuit (pictured, right, in Image 04 below) — this looked genuinely stylish and sexy. But it also gave us numerous outfits apparently put together from raids on the bargain bins at Victoria’s Secret, topped off with a cowboy hat. Indeed, scantily-clad cowgirls of one type or another were very much a 2026 thing.
Image 01, top of page: model Olandria, centre, wearing her Venus Prototype pink latex to promote Mattel’s Barbie pop-up at Coachella 2026. Olandria’s other looks at the festival included, left, corset minidress for YSL’s Beauty Drive Thru and, right, brown leather bikini cowgirl
But for a supposedly alt-vibed event like Coachella, it was perhaps a little surprising that quite so many attendees looked more like they’d joined a dress-rehearsal for the Stagecoach country music festival due to take place the weekend after Coachella (April 24-26) at the same venue.
Continuing the trend we’ve been observing for a while now at these big events, leather was the fetish fabric of choice for the vast majority of those wanting to express a level of kink affinity beyond just ‘sauciness’. And for those embracing it, black was definitely the couleur du jour, as illustrated by our selection of photos of guests thus clad (see images 06 and 07).
There was some black leather worn onstage too, most notably perhaps by Sombr (aka Shane Michael Boose) who, in his Valentino studded leather suit designed by Alessandro Michele, did a pretty good job of channelling The Doors’ Jim Morrison, visually at least.
However, for Google’s Gemini AI to imply that not just leather but also latex “dominated the fashion trends” suggested Gemini might have given too much weight to some latex enthusiast posts it had scraped for its summary.
Yes, there was ‘some’ latex — but blink and you might have missed it. Google’s own image search results revealed only one verifiable example of latex being worn for an actual stage performance. And this was when well-known rubber-lover Janelle Monae played a guest spot (Image 03, above left) with PinkPantheress on Weekend 2, clad in the Dead Lotus Couture black, white and red latex outfit she was first pictured in last year at the Human Rights 2025 Dinner in LA where she won the Equality Award (see Libidex Blog March 29 2025 item).
Latex also featured on models engaged to promote a couple of brands around the festival site. Impressive Coachella newcomer Olandria Carthen posed in pink latex by Venus Prototype for her promo appearances on Mattel’s new Barbie pop-up at the event.
And when she wasn’t promoting Barbie, Olandria was busy establishing broader kink-adjacent credentials with a leather bikini during Weekend 1 and a hot black mini corset-dress worn for the YSL Beauty Drive Thru in Indio on the eve of Coachella’s opening day. This article’s top image shows Olandria in all three of those outfits.
Meanwhile, in another brand promotion, models Valentina Page, Danger She Wrote and Kayley Gunner poured themselves into colourful latex outfits by Miami label Maggie Delena in order to promote three flavours of Fanta soft drinks (see Image 02).
However, the claim by Google’s AI that red latex was a “standout trend” at Coachella 2026, characterised by “vibrant red latex lingerie sets and dresses” seemed rather dubious. Having scrutinised and re-scrutinised the hundreds of shiny images Google offered from the festival, the only “vibrant red latex” lingerie set we could find was the vibrant red PVC lingerie set from Agent Provocateur, worn onstage (sometimes with a matching raincoat) by Addison Rae (Image 03, right).
And the only “vibrant red latex” dress we could find was another of Sabrina Carpenter’s numerous stage outfits: the ruby-red sequined (non-latex) Dior minidress she wore to open her show on Weekend 1. As you can see from the photos here (Image 03, right and Image 04, left), both these outfits could pass for latex (especially from a distance) if you didn’t know better. But we do our best to know better.
While Coachella 2026, as with other recent high profile, fashionable and media-friendly events, inevitably boasted its share of performers and other celebs who are associated historically with latex — but currently, not so much — it was genuinely heartwarming to see the appearance at the festival of a band with a legendary connection to actual BDSM culture that goes back more than 30 years.
We refer here to the Weekend 1 set by Nine Inch Noize, the reinvention of Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails as a supergroup including Trent’s wife Mariqueen Maandig (shown left and right in Image 05 above). The historical connection in question is the notorious and much-banned promo video directed by Jon Reiss for Nine Inch Nails’ 1992 track Happiness In Slavery, depicting torture scenes featuring the late Los Angeles performance artist and ‘supermasochist’ Bob Flanagan.
According to the band’s published setlist, Happiness in Slavery itself was not performed at Coachella. But of the 11 songs listed, nine were Nine Inch Nails tracks and one was a How To Destroy Angels cover (from the Reznors’ other music project). The eleventh was a cover of Soft Cell’s Memorabilia — a nod to another musical outfit with more than a passing interest in the emerging fetish and BDSM scenes of the late 20th century.
At last year’s Coachella, we felt that the prize for wearing the most striking fetish-adjacent stage outfits belonged to Thai K-Pop superstar Lisa (Lalisa Manobal) of Blackpink, who performed in fantastic ‘alien-reptile’ suits created by designer Asher Levine in collaboration with stylist Brett Alan Nelson (see Libidex April 25 2025 Blog item).
Well this year, Lisa returned to Coachella as one of the guest artists in the set from multimedia artist Anyma (Matteo Milleri), who closed Weekend 2 Day 1 with the world debut of his new show ÆDEN. The set featured Lisa performing the pair’s collaborative track Bad Angel live on stage while also appearing as a character on a gigantic video screen behind the stage, and also as a gigantic holographic, animatronic angel walking and hovering above the audience (see Image 08).
So in visual terms, it might not be unreasonable to conclude that Lisa & co killed it for a second year running at Coachella. It was something that even the guest appearance of Madonna during Sabrina Carpenter’s Weekend 2 set — which included performances of Vogue and Like a Prayer — couldn’t really top as spectacle.
However, Madonna did feature in perhaps the festival’s most bizarre behind-the-scenes drama when it transpired that two bags of her clothing and jewellery — including vintage pieces worn for the Carpenter show — had disappeared en route to a hotel. It was initially assumed that the bags had been stolen, but police later took the view that the bags had probably just fallen off the back of the golf cart that was transporting them along the bumpy road.
In Britain, everyone knows that the expression “they fell off the back of a lorry” is code for stolen items some dodgy geezer is offering for sale at knockdown prices. But whether “they fell off the back of a golf cart” turns out to be the Californian equivalent remains to be seen, we guess. Unsurprisingly, the Queen of Pop is offering a reward for their safe return.
