Everywhere you look this weekend, women will be wearing bald caps. If you know, you know

1 month ago 14

For two weekends, Christmas Queen and James Packer’s former fiancee Mariah Carey will be travelling across Australia, performing her greatest genre-blending hits as R&B festival Fridayz Live’s headline act.

If you happen to find yourself near Sydney’s Engie Stadium, Perth’s Langley Park and Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium over the coming days, however, you might not actually realise this.

Thousands of fans – overwhelmingly women – will be dressed seemingly for another occasion. Wearing suits, ties, goatees and aviator sunglasses, they will top off their look with the ensemble’s piece de resistance – a bald cap.

Pitbull fans across the country, including Melbourne’s Hayley Lim, 24, will be donning suits, ties, goatees and aviator sunglasses over the next two weekends. But the most important part of their outfit is the bald cap.

“I don’t know if I’m going to stay for [Mariah Carey] yet,” says 24-year-old Hayley Lim, who is attending Melbourne’s October 25 show with her brother. Both are there for one of history’s best-selling music artists: Pitbull.

Known for his bald head as much as his catchy collaborations with artists including Jennifer Lopez, Ke$ha and Usher, Lim has been a fan of “Mr 305” (the area code of the proud Floridian’s hometown, Miami) since the early 2010s. That’s when the Grammy-winning rapper and singer followed Pitbull Starring in Rebelution (2009) with back-to-back albums Planet Pit (2011), Global Warming (2012), Globalization (2014), and became a household name.

Lim has a banner in her living room inscribed, “Live, laugh, love, Mr Worldwide.” (It was necessary for Pitbull’s epithet to hail beyond Vice City as he dominated global charts, helped in part by the fact he honoured a prank campaign that saw him, in 2012, perform for 250 people on the remote Kodiak Island, off Alaska’s south coast). She will also be donning a bald cap next weekend, along with her brother.

“It’d be weird not to be Pitbull,” Lim muses.

Attending a Pitbull show dressed as the man himself has become a cultural moment in its own right. Take a scroll through the tens of thousands of #PitbullConcert videos on TikTok and Instagram, a significant amount with more than a million views each (around 100,000 views is generally considered viral), and you’d be hard-pressed to find one published after 2023 without a group of girls in bald caps.

Pitbull, pictured here in Texas in April, says seeing fans dress as him en masse is “an honour”.

Pitbull fans went all out in Brisbane on October 17 for Fridayz Live’s first show. It’s the first time Pitbull has toured Australia since 2012.

Mushroom Group and Southern Cross Austereo – the companies behind Fridayz Live – were quick to capitalise on this, offering bald caps for $20 as an add-on when tickets, starting at $199.90 plus fees, went on sale.

Although critics lambasted the event’s pricing (and Adelaide’s omission from the tour despite being RNB Fridayz Live’s birthplace), fans happily tacked on the extra expense, with the bald caps selling out almost immediately. Now, finding one that can be delivered in time, without paying an arm and a leg, is an almost Herculean task.

Lim was not taking any chances. She purchased hers in May when Fridayz Live announced its line-up. It’s understood Spotlight saw a spike in bald cap sales that same month. Search traffic for “bald caps” and related terms spiked in June, when tickets went on sale, and again in the three weeks before Fridayz Live’s October 17 opening night at Brisbane Showgrounds.

“It is very much a community,” says 26-year-old Amber Kades, who will be wearing a bald cap when she attends Melbourne’s turn with her parents and friends.

“It’s nice in this day and age, where a lot’s happening now, that you can take a minute and do something fun for yourself and not take yourself seriously.”

It’s not just the bald caps that Kades, whose family is from Albania, feels unites the fans. It’s the music itself. Some songs are Spanish-language, others bilingual.

“Even my grandparents who don’t speak English and don’t really understand, they just love the music,” says Kades. Her father introduced her to Pitbull’s music shortly before she went with her parents, cousins, aunties, uncles and grandparents to the Planet Pitt World Tour in 2012, Pitbull’s last trip Down Under. “We took up a whole row … they love the sound of it.”

Elsewhere in Marvel Stadium will be 25-year-old Aneesha Dean, whose “obsession” with Pitbull has not wavered from the moment Hotel Room Service was unleashed in 2009. She says dressing up as Pitbull is a “rite of passage” for any true fan.

“Dressing up in the bald cap feels almost empowering, feels like whatever men can do, women can do better,” Dean jokes.

Amber Kades has been a fan of Pitbull since her father introduced her to his music, just before her whole family went to the 2012 Planet Pit World Tour in Melbourne.

Kades will be attending Fridayz Live in Melbourne with her parents and friends, but she says she’s the only one of the group who will be dressing up.

But there is a deeper element to it. In no way is a Pitbull costume catering to the male gaze, which Dean finds freeing when nights out with the girls can take dangerous turns. “There’s going to be no cat-calling on the night,” says Dean. “It’s going to be amazing.”

Thirty-five-year-old Geelong mum Ashleigh Dyer also finds the “baldie” community – what Pitbull calls his fans – freeing. For the first time since she found out that, at 21 weeks pregnant, her HER2-positive breast cancer had returned, and subsequent treatment saw her lose her hair, no one will be looking twice at the soon-to-be mum-of-two.

“I’m not going to stand out whatsoever at the concert,” says Dyer, who this week is 32 weeks along. “Which will be nice just to, yeah, not get anyone doing a double take.”

Dyer may be “providing [her] own” bald head, but business is booming for Big Bald Cap – and artists who make attending their concerts a subculture. Taylor Swift fans spent hours making friendship bracelets and sewing bejewelled bodysuits to wear to The Eras Tour, which became the first concert series to cross the $US2 billion ($3 billion) mark and secured her billionaire status. Despite mixed reviews, Swift’s subsequent album, The Life of a Showgirl, moved more than four million units in its first week, up 1.4 million from The Tortured Poets Department.

Would this have been possible without social media? Probably not. Fandom has changed, says University of Sydney senior research associate Dr Emily Baulch. Where deep knowledge of lore used to be valued – hunting down a rare comic was no small feat, and that created status and belonging – social media has lowered the barriers to entry.

“Because information is instantly accessible, the value has shifted from knowing to doing,” says Baulch, who has a PhD in media communications. “It’s about performing fandom, being creative, and showing your connection through participation rather than expertise.”

Aneesha Dean, 25, finds dressing as Pitbull fun and freeing.

Brands, such as Netflix with its recent Wednesday Island installation – a fan event in which Cockatoo Island was transformed into a gothic playground – and artists, such as Swift, invite this collaboration, building community and commerce (merchandising, streams and ticket sales) by encouraging the fan-created trends.

“It’s a perfect collision of bottom-up and top-down forces,” says Baulch. “The relationship is reciprocal: grassroots creativity drives visibility, while institutional support turns it into a shared cultural moment and financial boon.”

Pitbull’s own social media pages are littered with footage of bald cap-clad fans at his concerts, something he told the BBC in June he’s “very, very happy” to see.

“It’s the ultimate trophy to be able to go on stage and see all the hard work that you put into the music. I’ve been in the game for 25 years and to see every demographic, everybody [dressing up] at the shows is priceless,” he said, calling the trend an honour. Perhaps that outlook is why some Fridayz Live attendees are yet to realise Carey is headlining.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.