Fyre Festival really is the millennial version of Woodstock, an iconic music festival that entirely sums up a generation. Woodstock brought together some of the best artists of the century in the culmination of the Summer of Love. Fyre Festival brought together some of the dumbest Instagrammers of the century for a fraudulent festival that never actually happened.
However, where Woodstock-ers only had tie-dye, Fyre had proper merch, which has finally gone on sale courtesy of the US Marshalls and we’d do anything to get our hands on it.
The ill-fated 2017 Fyre Festival was the brainchild of convicted fraudster Billy McFarland and B-list rapper Ja Rule, who pitched visitors on an Insta-perfect music festival in the Bahamas with big-name acts and big dreams, billed as Glastonbury crossed with Necker Island. But the resulting logistics nightmare was more reminiscent of a Red Cross refugee camp in a natural disaster zone, except with rich people.
As McFarland’s festival turned sour before it even began, the private jets turned away leaving hordes of ‘influencers’ stranded on the beach as the hapless star of the Netflix documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened, Andy King, prepared to do unthinkable things (anything!) for bottled water, But it seems that flogging merch wasn’t top of the Fyre organisers’ agenda, and the stock of Fyre branded clothing has been languishing in a police warehouse in Texas since the event.
Until now, that is, as US Marshalls are preparing to flog off seized items to the highest bidder. The online auction aims to raise money to repay victims of the fraud and includes items such as baseball caps, tracksuits and wristbands, and they’re racking up bids. Fancy a Fyre cap? That’ll be $305.
It’s a chance to own a piece of history. Sure, it’s not like finding a Roman horde of gold coins, or one of Churchill’s half-smoked cigars, but it’s still iconic. And when you explain to your grandchildren the lengths that Andy King was willing to go for Evian, then your $145 Fyre Festival trackky-bums will become precious heirlooms, passed down through the generations.
