Do I have to wear a Lederhosen or a Dirndl at the Oktoberfest?

“Will they let me in if I don’t have traditional Bavarian costume on?” is a question you’d be well entitled to ask if you take a look at the videos on YouTube or the photos of the Oktoberfest on people’s profiles. To judge by what’s out there, it looks like it’s some kind of dress code to get into tents.

But that isn’t the case at all, and there’s several reasons why!

First, the Oktoberfest started in 1810, back in the days when people in Munich thought lederhosen and dirndl dresses were really uncool. The Bavarian traditional costume was considered folksy, something to be worn by farmers and yokels, not the chattering classes of Munich (a city which has always been concerned with its style). So there was never a dress code for the festival, especially not one specifying lederhosen and dirndl. People have always worn whatever was in at the time to the Oktoberfest.

And that’s the second point: for a long time, what was in elsewhere was also in in Munich. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, it was American fashion (back then a revolution in Europe because it was so casual) which was worn into the beer tents: slacks, jeans, short-sleeved shirts and t-shirts. In fact, if you look at pictures of the Oktoberfest from the 1980s, you’d be hard pressed to find a lederhosen or a dirndl – both were way to old-hat at the time, and the suspicion of the Bavarian folksiness of the 1930s hung over them like a bad smell. Bavarian traditional dress was not really rehabilitated in Munich until the nineties, when it then gradually, step by step, it became popular.

Which brings us to the third point: the only people really wearing traditional Bavarian costume are the people dressed in Tracht, i.e. in the very specific regional clothing of their part of Bavaria. Everyone else, even if they are wearing leather breeches or a dirndl, is just wearing Bavarian-inspired fashion. So if the people who run the tents really were to impose a costume dress code, they’d cut their potential customer pool from millions to tens of thousands!

So you can wear pretty much whatever you like to the Oktoberfest (provided it’s decent) – from casual through to smart. What you will notice, however, is that more and more people are wearing Bavarian fashion.

If you’d like to blend in, the least you can do is to wear something sturdy-looking – guys especially, think jeans, boots, lumberjack shirts. Or, you can do more than stand out and actually try some lederhosen and dirndls – which is what we would recommend…!