This is one of the few events that define the Black British experience. Many attend for the sheer joy the parade brings and others for the outrageously bold fashions. This is the real draw: there’s nothing comparable to watching the revellers in their Mas costumes weave their way along Ladbroke Grove. Indeed, throughout its 56-year history, Notting Hill Carnival has evolved on all levels, especially when it comes to fashion. For better or worse, the costuming has changed, like many things, to accommodate trends.

“I remember going two years before the pandemic and thinking to myself I wouldn’t wear half this stuff now because it’s so skimpy,” Bianca Green, a make-up artist who started playing Mas – which is where parade dancers choose the Mas, short for masquerade, band they want to join, purchase their costume and on parade day wear it and dance through the streets with them – in the early 2000s, tells Stylist. “I played for a band which was Trinidadian; I spent hours adding feathers, beads and geometric shapes to velvet on a costume I only paid £90 for.”

In recent years, Carnival has become more about showing skin and less about the traditional aspects of the parade. The costumes were traditionally heavily infused with African and Indian elements, and religious rites were used to tell the story of slaves being freed during colonial times in the Caribbean. Years before its inception, riots took place across the UK due to the government’s racist housing policies and rising underemployment among Caribbean immigrants as they started arriving in England. Once it was established, Carnival became a way to protest and build community.

Notting Hill Carnival 2022: “I never want the Notting Hill Carnival fashion to change – and this is why”