On the first afternoon of ComplexCon, a head-spinning shoppable trade show, music festival and general meeting of North America’s sneaker zealots, Martin Pawelec stood out in his tucked-in golf polo.
“I don’t belong here as you can tell,” said Mr. Pawelec, a financial adviser from Chicago. Nonetheless, bloated bags from Bathing Ape and Anti Social Social Club puddled at his feet. They belonged to his 14-year-old son, who had already jetted off to purchase yet more tees and sweatshirts.
“Not all kids are into sports — some kids are into fashion,” said Mr. Pawelec, who despite sticking out like a fly in someone’s bottle of Prime energy drink, was enjoying himself. “That’s my kid. He likes shoes and clothes and Travis Scott.”
And kids similar to his son? Oh, there’s a lot of them: 60,000 teens, twenty and thirty-somethings (and occasionally some middle-aged, credit-card holding parents) flocked to Las Vegas this past weekend, for ComplexCon. Tickets ranged from $150 to $1,200 for the Cactus Jack V.I.P. tickets that included exclusive merch and a two-night hotel stay.
First held in Long Beach, Calif., in 2016, as an IRL offshoot of the online streetwear authority Complex, ComplexCon has morphed into a youth culture juggernaut. It’s Coachella for kids who can tell you the exact year the first Yeezy Boost came out. It’s ComicCon for people who desire little else than a Chrome Hearts hoodie. It’s the Super Bowl of kids describing T-shirts as “hard” or “fye.”
One Complex employee described the event as “streetwear Disneyland.” That isn’t far off. The convention grounds were peppered with town house-size blowup figurines, a cement truck and a carnival hammer game. At one point, members of the Jabbawockeez dance troop were spotted. Later, so was someone in a Sonic the Hedgehog costume.
Complex itself staged ample side attractions, including a live episode of the Drink Champs podcast featuring Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. Travis Scott, the show’s “creative director,” closed out the weekend with a fireworks-and-flames performance. The crowd moshed merrily.
ComplexCon is written off by some snobby aesthetes in the fashion industry as a noisy spectacle. That’s shortsighted. Walking ComplexCon is an invaluable, if oppressive, way to understand where fashion is going. It’s like digesting a 300-page trend report in two hours.
The takeaway? Kids want new T-shirts that come pre-faded, as if left out in the sun for 13 years; jeans that schlump with the elegance of couture trash bags; hoodies with bedazzled logos (Bebe is more of an influence on how young men dress than they’d care to admit); and beanies that make the wearers look as if they have cat ears. Hey, no one said every trend was in good taste.
The show also repeatedly brought home how “experience” is a key sweetener in shopping today. The companies that understood this amassed steady lines. Those included Nike, which used a jingly slot-machine game to introduce its newfangled 3-D printed Air Max 1000 sneaker, and the Swiss luxury label Vetements, which operated a customizable T-shirt screen- printing station. Those that didn’t had some pretty empty booths.
Sometimes, the experience was just getting to meet the guy who made your favorite shoes: On Saturday, the Crocs collaborator Salehe Bembury could barely walk a few feet without being stopped for a selfie.
“They want to meet the people behind the brand,” Andrew Brooks said as he sat in the booth for his New York-based brand Sinclair. The space had been constructed to look like a SoHo street: faux brick walls and a fire hydrant with a Maybach sedan sitting to the side.
People stopped to photograph the car, but some wandered in to dap up Mr. Brooks, whose clothes have been worn by rappers like Lil Baby and 42 Dugg. Mr. Brooks said that ComplexCon, which he was doing for the first time, provided a chance for a mostly online brand like his to connect with its customer offline.
“The kids want to touch and feel this stuff,” he said.
Mostly though, they want extremely limited gear they can brag about to their friends. If a booth had something exclusive or novel, it had a line. Crocs, introducing a new glow-in-the-dark shoe designed by Mr. Bembury, commanded an impressive queue. So did the streetwear upstart Hidden New York, which released a small run of Asics sneakers that sold out by about 3 p.m. on day one.
“Everyone just wants the newest stuff,” said Jacob Miller, 17, of Los Angeles, who was holding newly purchased, only-at-ComplexCon items from Sp5der, a streetwear label affiliated with the rapper Young Thug. “Everyone’s trying to keep up.”
An enduring lesson of ComplexCon: If a rapper owned it, or even wore it, people want it.
The longest queues snaked along the perimeter of booths for the Atlanta trap rapper Playboi Carti’s Opium brand, Mr. Scott’s CactusCon collaborations, and Hellstar, a rapper favorite that has come out of nowhere to be coveted by anyone born after the year 2000. (The weekend solidified that Travis Scott has fully weathered the tragedy at his 2021 Astroworld festival at which 10 people were crushed to death.)
ComplexCon was probably the only place you could find a sprawling mass waiting to buy Ed Hardy in the year 2024, thanks to a new collaboration with the rapper Ken Carson that dropped at the show. Rappers, perhaps even more so than athletes, are proving to be the key endorsers for the next generation of fashion consumers. Notably, the aforementioned rappers, save Young Thug, recently released from custody, were in appearance at ComplexCon in one way or another.
“I get to see some of my favorite creators here,” said Barry Davis, 20, of Los Angeles. Dressed in skintight jeans tucked into black boots and a black hoodie, Mr. Davis and two friends were at the tail-end of a zigzagging line to get into the Opium booth. They guessed the wait would be as long as three hours. But Mr. Davis was on a mission to present Mr. Carson with a rug he had made depicting the rapper’s last album cover.
“He made the album of the year, so I just made the rug to commemorate it,” said Mr. Davis, who designs under the name Pristineovereverything. Later in the day, Mr. Carson was spotted carrying the rug through the show, like a proud prize fighter hoisting a title belt.
In a twisted way, the lines themselves were a draw. How else could you show that you could not only afford a T-shirt but you wanted it so intensely that you were willing to wait an hour, or two or three, for it.
“It wasn’t so much pride — it was more determination,” said Carrie Kelly, 45, of Athens, Ga. “After we’d been in the line for two and a half hours, we weren’t getting out of the line.” On Sunday, she and her teenage son Luke waited five hours to enter the imposing “Dune”-like booth that held merch Mr. Scott made in partnership with companies like Playboy and Cactus Plant Flea Market.
So far, Mr. Kelly found ComplexCon “really nice,” he said. And what did Ms. Kelly think after waiting that long? “I love my son very much,” she said, deadpan.
Of course, streetwear remains a market ripe for flipping, and some came to ComplexCon with one thing on their minds: profit.
“I just spent $10,000, and my goal is to make a 40 to 50 percent profit,” said Angel Torres, 22, who runs Heaven, a sneaker and streetwear resale shop in Oxnard, Calif. On Saturday afternoon he was surrounded by overstuffed shopping bags from Sp5der, as if he were a day trader specializing in jewel-encrusted hoodies.
Still, there was no guarantee that the hype would last once ComplexCon ended. “You don’t know it’s going to sell, but your job is to sell it,” Mr. Torres said. He had faith, though. “The kids know how to spend their money.”
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