ComplexCon 2017: Reactions And The Future

In the past few years, street culture, its associated clothing, and the brands that have stemmed from it are no longer relegated to specialty shops and cool-guy boutiques that the cognoscenti had to put you onto. It hasn’t been that way for a while. And there’s nothing wrong with that—any band would love to make the transition from garage shows to selling out stadiums, no question. Undoubtedly, brands are the new bands. The amount of kids who would rather spend their time getting ill at guitar or banging away at a drum kit is dwindling in comparison to the number who slave away flipping graphics on Photoshop, curating Instagram feeds, and thinking about the aesthetic of their Shopify or Big Cartel pages. A huge part of this is because of the pioneers that have proven their parents wrong, and showed a new generation that it’s possible to not just “make it” in the creative industry, but actually make it big. Supreme is a multi-million dollar brand. Just recently, we helped Barneys turn “the drop,” that Pavlovian conditioning that has eager shoppers ready to spend every Thursday morning at 11 a.m., into a shopping event that attracts kids eager to cop wares by Virgil Abloh, Heron Preston and Palm Angels. Tons of kids came ready to cop exclusives, and many more came just to hang out in a department store, turning the storied retailer into a community hub. But perhaps the biggest example of street culture’s evolution from anti-establishment to establishment itself is ComplexCon, a two-day event that transforms the Long Beach Convention Center into a Valhalla for cool shit, where it goes to be praised amongst its peers, consumed en masse and ascends to eBay at a 300% markup. Read more at Highsnobiety.