All Things Go Fall Classic
Union Market / Washington, DC
coverage by casey tomchek
In 2018, a group of 45 international music festivals pledged to address the glaring gender gap in the music festival industry by achieving 50/50 gender-balanced lineups by 2022. Since then, awareness of the issue has skyrocketed, but a quick glance at this year’s major festivals is enough to see that progress is moving at a much slower pace.
While larger festivals continue to drop the ball on gender parity, the All Things Go Fall Classic, a two-day food and music festival in Washington, D.C., has built its brand on showcasing women both on stage and behind the scenes.
Last year, the festival went beyond the goal of 50/50 representation and worked with artists Maggie Rogers and Lizzy Plapinger (LPX) to curate an entirely female Saturday lineup. The All Things Go team was also quick to drop their 2018 Sunday headliner, BORNS, after allegations of sexual misconduct arose just days before the festival.
Now in its sixth year, All Things Go continued to amplify diverse voices with an all-female lineup- this time on Sunday- and a Saturday lineup featuring plenty of female and non-binary performers, with sets from MUNA, Chelsea Jade and headliners CHVRCHES. All but three acts (Arkells, COIN and LANY) across the entire festival were female-fronted.
All Things Go’s push for representation wasn’t limited to the stage, or even the music industry. This was their second year of hosting Classic Conversations, a set of two panels on women’s issues that took place the Friday before the festival at D.C.’s Eaton hotel.
The first panel covered women in music and featured a diverse group of women from across the industry, including Pitchfork editor-in-chief Puja Patel, Atlantic Records marketing director Caiti Green, and All Things Go artist mxmtoon. The second panel was on women storytellers, and featured journalists and documentarians from NatGeo, the Washington Post, CNN and NPR podcasts Code Switch and Invisibilia.
D.C. music festivals tend to come and go, with Landmark lasting only one year and Sweetlife scaling down in 2017. While some festival organizers may see female-heavy lineups as a risk or claim that the pool of female talent is “just not there,” for the All Thing’s Go Fall Classic, women have (unsurprisingly) proven to be the key to success.
