ABSTRACT
The idea of boutique festivals as commerce-free platforms relates, then, not to an absence of commercial interactions but to the form of escapism they provide and the way they are strategically presented to appeal to their audiences. There are illuminating parallels between boutique festivals and other types of boutique offering, which affirm what purpose they serve as an aggregated category within festival culture. The first British businesses that came to be labelled as boutiques were small clothing outlets in the 1950s, spaces that had simply appropriated the French translation of shop, exploiting the strong associations between high fashion, sophistication and French couture. Boutique festivals are positioned to supply a proposed solution, within a lifestyle that is loaded with coinciding choices, where part of the theatre of consumption is in the making of quasi-socio-political statements. Crucially, boutique events engage their audiences in an experience that is placed, meaningfully, at some distance from the concert-model event.
