If you were lucky enough to secure tickets to Kelsea Ballerini’s sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday, Oct. 29, you’d likely also memorized every word to Patterns—within four days of its release last week. I personally treated the evening like a cathartic sing-a-long to Ballerini’s fifth studio album, which the artist describes as a "brutal look into myself and the people I love most."
Surveying the crowd, every attendee was clad in fringe and cowboy boots or studs and glitter. The occasional concert-goer wore merch for Ballerini's hits like "Cowboys Cry Too" or DIY tributes to "Rolling Up the Welcome Mat." But my main takeaway was that roughly one in five of the 19,000 attendees—across hair textures and colors—sought to recreate Ballerini’s go-to tousled beach waves.
