5 days Ago
Bud Brimberg poses in the Bayou Wear tent during the first day of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune) Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save Thousands pass through the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival gates each year, and there's one funky factor that makes it easy to decipher the devotees from the newcomers: a printed BayouWear Hawaiian shirt . Over the last four decades, the button-downs have become part of the unspoken Jazz Fest dress code, a uniform that’s celebrated by many beyond New Orleans locals.
In fact, the shirt's story is woven into the fabric of the Crescent City’s biggest music celebration. Each new festival season brings a brand new BayouWear print, typically depicting classic festival iconography, like the trumpeting Jazz Fest man or other iconic New Orleans symbols. Festival-goers pose wearing the latest Bayou Wear design, a quirky pattern that gives a zoomed out look at the Jazz and Heritage Festival grounds.
Collectors and those looking to get in on the trend eagerly await the newest design. But it’s not just the new releases that festival enthusiasts covet. Many of the older, and often rarer, prints are fawned over by BayouWear loyalists.
Even Jazz Fest performers are in on the action. Each year, iconic jazz singer Irma Thomas designs a custom dress with the latest fabric print to wear onstage. For clothing line owner Bud Brimberg, 74, the reason behind BayouWear's success has everything to do with the way his garments celebrate the art and culture that define Jazz Fest.
“That’s where it comes from," he said. "It’s taking a look at the culture, extracting it and abstracting it while being true, colorful and fun. “ From posters to clothing lines The story of BayouWear begins with a different medium — print posters.
While in his final year at Tulane Law, then 24-year-old Brimberg enrolled in an entrepreneurship class. As part of his coursework, he was tasked with creating an idea for a business. Brimberg took it one step further and conceptualized a collectible poster series for the Jazz and Heritage Festival and took it to Quint Davis, the event's longtime producer, eventually convincing Davis to work with him.
Forty years later, the posters are the most collectible print series in the world, with vintage prints selling for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. In 1981, six years after the first poster was created, Brimberg presented his latest idea, designed by a local artist, to Davis. Davis wasn't too keen on the latest mockup, but one detail stood out.
"He said, 'Yeah, you know, the poster's okay. But I love the shirt the guy is wearing,'" Brimberg said. "And silly me, once again, I said 'Oh, okay I'll make the shirt.
'" The 2025 Jazz Fest outfits are put on display outside the Bayou Wear tent during the first day of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, Thursday, April 24, 2025. (Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune) From there, he took the design to a company in Mississippi to print out his debut cotton shirts. Unfortunately, with little experience in clothing design, Brimberg said he messed up on one key detail — the inks used on the shirts weren't fixed stable inks, meaning they bled out on wearers.
Despite turning a few first-time customers blue, the shirt became an instant hit. The design process These days, the BayouWear design process has been significantly refined. The garments are now made of rayon, after cotton became too limiting, and the clothing line sells everything from shirts to skirts, aprons and camisoles.
Dozens of artists have been commissioned to design patterns, often picked for their unique technique or style. Brimberg said when he approaches an artist to design the year's fabric print, he'll come with a broad idea — along with photos and sketches of past designs — but ultimately lets the artist make their mark on the piece. “They just, they just go.
They start with an idea. And it might be that we have to go through — same with the poster — three or four before we get to something," he said. "It'll shift, and it takes a surprising amount of time to come up with and design.
” Fernanda and Irma Gonzalez are from San Antonio and attending their second Jazz Fest. On the second day of this year's fest they were spotted sporting the 2014 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage BayouWear shirts that Art4Now creates every year. It's easy to see why the process is so labor intensive.
Each BayouWear piece is intricate and must feel tied to the culture of New Orleans or Jazz Fest, from the image down to the specialty buttons, which Brimberg takes special pride in designing himself each year. Baked into every BayouWear print is a small Easter egg, ready to be spotted by detail-oriented customers. Take, for example, the classic watermelon print, released in 2014.
On several slices of watermelon, the fruit's seeds line up to create a fleur de lis design. If you look even closer, zooming in on newsprint in the background, you'll spot "Bayou Wear," printed sporadically throughout page excerpts, Brimberg shared. That "artisanal" touch has cemented the brand into the hearts of fans of the festival.
“We put as much content, thought execution and time in a single image that hopefully captures what others might take 100 images to do," he said. This year's print The 2025 print, cheekily named "InTents Affair, " is the first time the clothing line has portrayed a bird's eye view of the full festival. The lively pattern is packed with dozens of bright blue, red and yellow tents, along with strings of triangle flags, festival stages and crowds scattered across the fairgrounds.
To keep the image from looking like any other fair, Brimberg and artist Marta Rusin packed several elements in to ensure it oozed Jazz Fest spirit. On the festival stage, a group of Mardi Gras Indians can be seen performing in feathered outfits. Near one of the large tents, wearers can spot crowds watching as a second line parade marches down the street.
Near the flagpole, you can even find an image of the BayouWear tent. This year's specialty buttons, which were individually hand-painted, match the stage's design and even include the band of Mardi Gras Indians. The Bayou Wear clothes pattern for 2025 Jazz Fest includes button that look like the Jazz & Heritage Stage during he New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, Thursday, April 24, 2025.
(Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune) BayouWear products were once only sold at at its Jazz Fest tent smack in the middle of the Fair Grounds, but fans of the brand can now find products online at Art4Now.com . There, the brand also sells designs from years past, rotating popular patterns in and out every so often.
Though a majority of BayouWear clothes sales now come through the website, according to Brimberg, the company will remain a festival mainstay for years to come, keeping the cultural thread of Jazz Fest alive..
