Redhead Day , Dutch Summer Festival, Nederlands

Redhead Day (Roodharigendag in Dutch) is the name of a Dutch summer festival that takes place each first weekend of September in the city of Tilburg, and up to 2018 in the city of Breda, in the Netherlands. The two-day festival, which inaugurated in 2005, is a gathering of people with natural red hair, but is also focused on art related to the colour red.

Activities during the festival are lectures, workshops and demonstrations which are aimed specifically at red-haired people. The festival attracts attendance from fifty countries and is free of charge due to sponsorship of the local government. To be classified a 'Redhead', each participant must not have altered their natural hair colour. Additionally it is encouraged (but not required) to have red clothing.

The festival was started in 2005 unintentionally by the Dutch painter Bart Rouwenhorst in the small Dutch city of Asten. As a painter, he was inspired by artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Gustav Klimt. Both of these artists created dramatic portraits of women, and both artists made famous paintings depicting redheaded women. To follow in the footsteps of his favourite painters, Rouwenhorst planned an exhibition of fifteen new paintings of redheads. Finding models was problematic, since redheads are rare in the Netherlands where only two percent of the population has natural red hair. To find models, an advertisement was placed in a local newspaper. However, instead of 15, 150 models volunteered.

Not wanting to turn down so many potential models, Rouwenhorst decided to choose 14 models, organize a group photo shoot for remaining redheads, and have a lottery to decide by chance who would be the 15th and final model. Thus began the first Red head day.

That year, the focus was on red-haired women only, since they were asked to volunteer to pose for the paintings. At the events in later years, the aim was to attract redheaded men as well as women, but still the sexes are not equally distributed. The first meeting attracted 150 natural redheads.

The weekend-long festival is free to attend, and you don’t have to be a redhead to go friends, family, and admirers are all welcome. Photographers set up tents all over town, poised to do individual photo-shoots. There are speed-meeting sessions, art exhibits, fashion shows, a high heels race, lectures on the history of red hair, an Irish whiskey tasting, and beauty tutorials. An assortment of food trucks park around Kasteelplein (Castle Square), prepared to feed the crowds, and of-age attendees can quench their thirst at the Saturday night pub crawl.

The only event that requires crimson tresses is the group photo, which is taken on the last day of the festival. In 2015, the last time an official count was done, 1,721 redheads wearing blue were included in the group shot, breaking the festival’s own 2013 Guinness World Record of 1,672 redheads in one place. 

What started as a small gathering has grown into a major event attended by upwards of 5,000 people from more than 80 countries. While a number of similar festivals have popped up across Ireland, London, Portland, Chicago, and Georgia, Breda claims the title of the original and the largest.