Atmosphere
It also has a reputation for a party atmosphere, with a large proportion of attendees choosing to wear fancy dress. Recent years have seen large groups of costumes that vary from Fred Flintstone and Wilma to Care Bears, dance troops, wrestlers and many other interesting costumes. More recently items of recent media interest or advertisements form a key theme. Saddam Hussein, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush have made appearances. Movie figures such as Men in Black (MIB) and Austin Powers are crowd favorites and an impersonator of Austin has been a regular feature each year performing to the crowd.
In 2009 Air New Zealand, one of the major sponsors for the Wellington sevens, introduced a 'Beads for Kisses' ambient media campaign as a yearly sevens ritual. Over 100,000 strings of Mardi gras style beads were given to the crowd, who could then exchange the beads for kisses from other participants. This was followed in 2010 with the addition of kissing booths.
Read more about this topic: Wellington Sevens
Famous quotes containing the word atmosphere:
“The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“We must be generously willing to leave for a time the narrow boundaries in which our individual lives are passed ... In this fresh, breezy atmosphere ... we will be surprised to find that many of our familiar old conventional truths look very queer indeed in some of the sudden side lights thrown upon them.”
—Bertha Honore Potter Palmer (1849–1918)
“Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)