Florence, Alabama, is a music city. Take a brief drive throughout the close by Tennessee River and also you’ll end up in Muscle Shoals, house of legendary establishments like Fame Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. Aretha Franklin recorded in Muscle Shoals. So did Little Richard, Duane Allman, Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones, and Lynyrd Skynyrd. That listing isn’t even shut to finish—and that was simply within the previous days. Artists and bands from round America and the world nonetheless report within the space continuously. So. Yeah. Music city.
However a style city? Not for many of its existence. Not till Billy Reid, who decamped from New York Metropolis within the early 2000s, determined to settle into his spouse’s hometown. Earlier than lengthy, he launched his namesake model and arrange store on the primary drag of Courtroom Road, in an area that was once a bookstore. And never too lengthy after that, in 2009, he began throwing a fairly rattling good social gathering. He invited of us from throughout, however particularly American style facilities like New York and Los Angeles. He referred to as it the Shindig.
“There was no actual social media at the moment,” Reid explains. “We had tried to ascertain an American style home within the Deep South—and naturally I used to be in New York beforehand and had that connectivity—however the concept was to deliver individuals right here and present them what we’re doing. To take them by way of the gathering, clearly, but in addition simply entertain the hell out of them. Take them to the music studios. Actually attempt to clarify the historical past of the neighborhood, the music scene, and the way that each one connects, in addition to exhibiting them a good time.”
People had enjoyable. So there was one other Shindig. And one other. Annually, the bands acquired larger (Jason Isbell, Alabama Shakes, the Raconteurs, and Kacey Musgraves have all performed units), the meals acquired fancier, the visitor listing grew (inside purpose—as Reid notes, “There’s solely so many lodge rooms”). All of a sudden, Florence wasn’t only a music city. It wasn’t only a style city. It was a pageant city, too. Then a pandemic rolled round and knocked the entire thing off monitor.
Till this month, that’s. Through the second weekend of October, Florence was as soon as once more buzzing with exercise because the Shindig Revival hit city. (“It’s not normally this busy,” famous one attendee who grew up within the space.) On Friday, the Billy Reid retailer on Courtroom—now with a freshly curated archive part that was once an inaccessible “hoarder’s paradise,” in line with Reid—was brimming with of us procuring the autumn 2024 assortment, sipping drinks, and devouring shrimp cocktails. A live performance within the park, a welcome dinner, and a raucous present by the Kills on the Shoals Neighborhood Theatre adopted.
On Saturday, between journeys to Fame and Muscle Shoals studios, attendees chilled out at a tailgate on the banks of the Tennessee or kicked round city. Then got here the primary occasion—at the very least from a style perspective. Up and down the aisles of the Shoals Theatre, fashions walked in a mixture of present and archival items for Billy Reid’s twentieth-anniversary style present as musician Abraham Alexander performed onstage.
It was putting how seamlessly these archival designs built-in with the present assortment. However then, in line with Reid, that’s by design. “If something, there’s been a consistency,” he says of his twenty years of designing clothes. “I feel that’s saved us related. It’s saved us resilient, and it is helped us construct a loyalty. The entire premise was to make items that stay with you. You’re going to put on them now, however ten or twenty years from now, or ten years in the past, they’d’ve been related. Yeah, it could current itself in a brand new manner right here or there, relying on what the vibe is or what’s occurring on this planet, however there’s that consistency with the piece itself and with what you’re getting.”
The present was a distillation of the occasion writ massive: music, style, of us from across the nation, and an entire lot of southern attraction all rolled into one. Solely becoming, then, that Gillian Welch and David Rawlings took the stage instantly after to maintain the vibe going earlier than the assemblage of friends spilled into the alley behind Reid’s retailer for some late-night celebration and somewhat extra music (this time from Billy himself on guitar; his son, Walton, on vocals; and a full backing band). Even with the gang packed shoulder to shoulder, the temper was genuinely convivial. A gaggle of strangers turned pals, at the very least for the Shindig.
“Actually what’s made all of it these years is the individuals which have been concerned,” Reid says. “Lots of these individuals did it out of the goodness of their hearts. Got here right here, they usually had been simply a part of our buddy group that had been cooks and musicians and artists. That spirit is what made it’s as we speak, and that’s nonetheless what’s occurring now.”
