What Is a Rave?
A First-Timer’s Guide to Rave Culture

You arrive, get searched, get a wristband or a stamp, and walk into a room that is already loud. The early DJs are warming it up. Nobody is watching the stage yet; people are finding their friends, getting water, working out where the sound is best.

Then the night builds. Each DJ plays a long set, often an hour or more, and hands over to the next one without a break in the music. The crowd fills in, the lights get busier, and somewhere past midnight the headliner comes on, and the whole room moves at once. Lasers, screens, and strobes run with the music, so the peak of a track is something you see as well as hear.

Around you, people are dancing in their own way, trading kandi bracelets, checking on a stranger who looks worn out, passing water around. You feel the bass in your ribs. It goes on long enough that pacing yourself matters.

How crazy does it get? Louder and later than anything else you go to. Not every rave is about drugs, whatever the reputation says; plenty of people go for the music and nothing else. The environment is intense, though, and raves are not for everyone. If you like being in a crowd that has agreed to dance until the sun comes up, you will be fine.

The music came first, in two American cities. House music grew out of Chicago in the early 1980s, shaped at a members’ club called The Warehouse, where Frankie Knuckles was the resident DJ from 1977 to 1982. Techno came out of Detroit in the mid-1980s, made by three high-school friends from Belleville, Michigan: Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May. A 1988 UK compilation, Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, gave the sound its name.

The word “rave” and the warehouse scene came from Britain. In the summer of 1987, a group of London DJs came back from Ibiza with acid house records and opened club nights around them: Shoom in London, and the sound spread to The Haçienda in Manchester. The two summers that followed, 1988 and 1989, are still called the Second Summer of Love. The clubs could not hold the crowds, so the parties moved into empty warehouses and fields around the M25 motorway, and by the end of the decade “rave” was the word for the whole scene.

It crossed back to America fast. A Brooklyn DJ named Frankie Bones played the British outdoor raves in 1989, came home, and started the Storm Rave parties. The first one was on 11 May 1991 in a brickyard in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for about 200 people. The scene grew from there on both coasts through the 1990s, and the genres widened with it: hardcore, jungle, drum and bass, trance.

The laws followed. In 1994, the UK passed an act that let police shut down open-air night gatherings playing music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats”. In 2003, the United States passed the RAVE Act, which made venue owners and promoters liable for drug use on their premises. Both made unlicensed parties harder to run, and much of the scene moved into licensed venues and ticketed festivals, which is most of what a rave means today.

A raver is anyone who goes, but the word carries an idea with it: PLUR, for peace, love, unity, and respect. It is the closest thing rave culture has to a rule book, and it has a real origin.

Frankie Bones told the story himself in a 2016 interview with Insomniac Magazine. On 4 July 1990, he and his brother painted “Peace Love and Unity” on a New York subway car; they called it the movement, PLUM. In 1993, at an outdoor party in a Bronx park, a fight broke out next to the DJ booth. Bones grabbed the mic and told the crowd that if they did not start showing some peace, love, and unity, he would break their faces. A raver on an early internet forum wrote it up with “respect” in place of “movement”, and that version stuck. Bones’ own line: “PLUR is the raver manifesto.”

In practice, PLUR looks like this. You give people room to dance. Someone looks unwell, you check on them, even if you have never met. Drama stays outside. Kandi, the beaded bracelets ravers make and trade, change hands with a handshake that spells the four words out one by one, and giving one to a first-timer is the usual welcome.

For the longer version, the rave safety tips post covers hydration, the buddy system, and pacing in detail, and if you come home still wearing the band, here is how to loosen a festival wristband without cutting it.

There is no dress code at a rave, which is why the outfits are the first thing you notice. Bright prints, mesh, jerseys, cloaks, bodysuits, glitter; the crowd dresses for the lights and for a long night of moving. The practical rules are the same for everyone: pieces that move with you, shoes that last, a layer you can carry, and nothing that needs fixing every time your arms go up.

Jerseys work for almost anyone. A rave baseball jersey buttons over whatever you have on, breathes, and carries an all-over print. The hockey jersey is the loose cut in the photos, the one people reach for when it is cold or when they want the whole crew in the same design.

For the full outfit, piece by piece and with sizes, read the women’s rave outfit guide or the guide for guys. And if your crew wants to match, the custom jerseys page is the way in: send us your idea, logo, reference image, or just the vibe, and see the full mockup before you pay.