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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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I’m standing in a piteous rain, in front of an auto garage on Flushing Avenue, staring across the street at a line of people that stretches back at least two full avenues. The mechanics standing behind me are idly curious: “What the hell is going on over there?”

I kind of think that if I started to try to explain it, I’d grow old and die on this street corner.

Hypefest, which takes place the same weekend as the New Yorker Festival and New York Comic Con, is a two-day streetwear celebration featuring art, music, food, and, of course, shopping. Hosted throughout several large, vaguely fish-scented buildings in the currently hip Brooklyn Navy Yard, it’s the first large-scale festival organized by the Hong Kong-based media and e-commerce giant Hypebeast, founded by Kevin Ma in 2005. And it’s an answer to ComplexCon, the glorified mall and music festival hosted by the “youth culture” media monolith Complex in Long Beach, California, every November.

Both celebrate the ever-growing online “hype” culture around anything exciting — Elon Musk and the modern commercial space race; basketball sneakers and a handful of famous men in hip-hop; startup streetwear brands and the legendary fashion houses that embrace them. Surprise and unlikeliness are key, which is why this crew loves loose-cannon tech CEOs as much as they love Kanye West, and also as much as they love bizarre collaborations like Balenciaga and Crocs or Louis Vuitton and Supreme.

Note a tiny hypebeast in an Adidas tracksuit. And, in the distance, a yacht Hypefest attendees can sign up to stand on. Kaitlyn Tiffany/Vox

Hypefest was barely announced, save for some Instagram posts last month and an 800-word New York Times preview titled “If you hype it, will they come?” Tickets weren’t made available until three weeks in advance, at which time Ma wrote on his Instagram, “Culture and learning shouldn’t have a price attached to it. I will personally cover the cost of tickets to make Hypefest a free experience for all.”

He gave out 10,000 free tickets in a matter of minutes.

The location of the festival was kept a secret until two days before, at which time it was announced only to ticket holders. The requisite Hypefest app, also usable only to ticket holders, hosted an elaborate digital store, which was the only way to buy anything you saw at the event. There was no cash allowed — even food trucks and the several enormous Ciroc stations weren’t permitted to take anything but credit cards or Apple Pay.

All these measures seem dramatic but were presumably necessary, given that the culture we’re talking about is one literally named for its excess energy and known for ambitious, flagrantly ridiculous resale scams. Also its high percentage of young male fans.

The location of Hypefest was kept a secret until two days before

Of the many things available for sale at Hypefest, a $1,700 suitcase is the most coveted. It’s making an exclusive debut at the festival, and it’s the reason many of these people got out of bed this morning.

For example: Axel, 15, and Chris, 14, a pair of incredibly polite friends who drove up from Washington, DC, with their parents. They are wearing Comme des Garçons Nikes and 2011 Jordan 1s, respectively; they tell me they came to Hypefest for the experience, and to buy two of the suitcases.

Other stuff sells out — notably, freeze-dried flowers preserved in glass blocks by Japanese artist Azuma Makoto (ranging from $260 to $600), and tactical vests from Pharrell Williams’s Billionaire Boys Club, which go for $1,100 each. But it’s the suitcase, a collaboration between Off-White (the Italian brand founded by Kanye West creative director Virgil Abloh) and Rimowa (a fancy German luggage company, majority-owned by LVMH), that’s the talk of the party.

The suitcase sells out immediately, but no worries — every couple of hours, it gets restocked, which festivalgoers are alerted to by a push notification. Each time, it sells out again about two minutes later. This happens at least five times.

The setting for Hypebeast’s first festival was a smattering of fish-scented buildings owned by the Brooklyn Fish Transfer. Kaitlyn Tiffany/Vox

Before I asked if I could go to Hypefest, I told my editor, “I think I love the hypebeasts. At least they’re getting excited. At least someone’s having an adrenaline rush.” If that’s true, it must be a behind-the-computer state of play. Everyone in line for the first round of shuttle buses to the navy yard on Saturday looks like they’d rather chew gravel than smile. (The buses are also effectively crowd control, serving no real crucial transportation purpose, as each group travels about 800 feet in them and there are no return buses.)

My first order of business upon disembarking the “shuttle bus” is not buying a $1,700 suitcase, but waiting in a small corral in order to meet the extremely famous young person Jaden Smith, who is announcing a denim line made in collaboration with the Dutch brand G-Star. Standing in the corral for 40 minutes, I am not permitted to leave to go to the bathroom, but I am permitted to look around my immediate vicinity.

Everybody is tall and wearing all black, except a baby wearing a camouflage Bape hoodie. Lots of people are pausing to take a picture of the back of a bald guy’s neck as he peruses Lacoste polos — probably because he has a tattoo there, of a pair of eyes, that looks suspiciously similar to Zayn Malik’s tattoo of Gigi Hadid’s eyes. All clothes are designer, unless they’re Scarface T-shirts or hoodies from the famed Atlanta strip club Magic City. It doesn’t immediately seem like anyone’s that cool, but I can concede they’re all cooler than me.

A fashion reporter, also stationed in the corral, looks down at my chunky white sneakers — relatively new but already slightly scuffed, modeled extremely vaguely after the current trend of designing shoes to look like swollen lips — and asks, “So what are those?”

“They’re from Target!” I say, throwing my arms wide like I’m Betty Draper about to show off a serving tray of Heineken. I hope it will be funnier than it is.

Ten minutes later, Jaden Smith — son of Will Smith, star of Netflix’s Neo Yokio, general presence in hip-hop — arrives to introduce his denim collection wearing what I can only guess is about 50 pounds of (mostly denim) clothing. Denim jacket, denim pants. He has both a fanny pack and a tactical vest, and though I can’t really get close enough to see, it seems like he’s not using all this storage space for anything in particular.

Outside our admittedly not-very-private corral, dozens of teens and 20-somethings press in and reach for his hand. Smith gives it. He smiles a glittery famous person smile. “We got floating mannequins inside; it’s gonna be awesome,” he tells the general air, seeming genuinely friendly and enthused, bouncing either because he is happy or because that is how you have to move if you are a tiny boy-wire inside enough fabric to cover a grizzly bear.

Jaden Smith poses with a fan at Hypefest, inside the G-Star booth. Kaitlyn Tiffany/Vox

He leads us into a conical structure I am hoping is not actually supposed to be a teepee and points up at three headless mannequins, suspended by invisible cords. They are wearing denim. The denim, it is explained, is sustainable. Some of it is undyed; some of it is dyed with indigo that doesn’t use salt; all of it uses less water than other denim.

“We have floating mannequins that are flying, because we want them to fly,” Smith explains. “G-Star clothes give you superpowers.” He turns to someone from G-Star and says, “The floating’s great. The floating’s great.” He explains that sustainability is important to him, and I believe him. I look at him for a few minutes longer than I feel I want to, because it just seems like what you should do if there’s a celebrity a few feet away and he’s thanked you for coming.

After I’ve touched raw denim, I wander outside, past the main stage where about two dozen boys are attempting to mosh to a DJ playing the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside,” and talk to a man waiting in line for empanadas. He points suddenly to my chest and says, “What is that?” That is a 3-inch-tall teddy bear holding an orange leaf. I remember that I bought it for 50 cents at the flea market in Avon, New York, last weekend, and that I pinned to the lapel of my stained Topshop jacket more or less as a joke.

“So you’d be making a 10,000 percent profit if you sold it to me right now for $5?” the man says. I think he’s joking, so I laugh, and then he says he’ll also buy me an empanada. I say something weird about how I’m “just getting acquainted” with my bear, I’ve only had him for one week, I don’t know if I need $5 that badly. “I mean, I know I’m a journalist, but it’s not that dire today,” I tell him, and he says the empanadas are really good. His friend, who is wearing an Endxiety hat reading “Our Lord & Savior Elon Musk,” tells him to please give up, I’m not parting with it.

It will take me close to 48 hours to realize that I wrote the man’s name down wrong and he’s Rhuigi Villaseñor, the 26-year-old owner of Rhude, an (extremely expensive!) LA streetwear label best known for the fact that Frank Ocean, Kendrick Lamar, and LeBron James wear it.

Anyway, he is really nice. He’s here to help launch a new sneaker with Puma. He tells me, “It’s great for the culture to be social, because it’s an Instagram world. It’s good for kids to be socializing who are, in one way or another, a little awkward.” I say, “Do you think they’re socializing?”

He says, “No.”

Rhude designer Rhuigi Villaseñor drinking a Sprite at Hypefest. Kaitlyn Tiffany/Vox Adidas’s booth at Hypfest, where attendees could sign up to create their own “never built” shoe. Kaitlyn Tiffany/Vox

It’s sort of a rhetorical question, as I can already see that they mostly aren’t. The thing about an event designed to educate you about expensive goods, I reason, is that the expensive goods are the education in and of themselves. You don’t need to hear explanations of them. You don’t need to hear outside opinions. A pair of sneakers being sold for $350 is worth $350, and probably more once there aren’t any left. I’m happy enough with this explanation — who doesn’t want a hobby that’s as simple as arithmetic and supply and demand?

Hypefest is a beautiful mall, essentially two dozen Instagram-ready stations for brands that don’t often appear outside of Instagram. Everybody is a walking price tag, and doing the math is as easy as a Google search on the free, ubiquitous wifi. The air is thick with humidity and money: Women wear ground-length Opening Ceremony raincoats, Prada fanny packs, Helmut Lang sweatshirts, Balenciaga sneakers, and vintage Apple employee jackets that go for around $400 on eBay. Men are in Off-White Nikes with the tags still on, Supreme hoodies, Anti-Social Social Club windbreakers, and Advisory Board Crystals beanies that are about $200 each on the popular resale app Grailed.

Jake Woloshin, 23, is wearing Ava Nirui’s Marc Jacobs hoodie (advertised as an “official bootleg,” which … okay), which means he is currently wearing $125 on his torso. But he tells me he couldn’t resist the new Heron Preston hoodies he saw today, so he picked one up; tomorrow, his torso will be worth $475.

As for his feet, they’re in relatively modest Timberlands, and he tells me he’s glad he’s not wearing the same Travis Scott Air Jordan 4s everyone else is wearing. This is a point reiterated by nearly everyone I speak to. They are mortified by the amount of Travis Scott merch. “You’d think he was performing,” says a New Jersey podcast host, smiling kind of, but mostly rolling his eyes.

Marc Jacobs set up a photo booth where Hypefest attendees could pose in Marc Jacobs-branded surgical masks. Kaitlyn Tiffany/Vox

I have a lot of time to wander around, as I can’t get drunk and I can’t buy anything and I can’t even really merit anyone’s attention because good lord, look at my outfit.

I wander past a car completely covered in packets of $100 bills, which is apparently an ad for a hotel in Los Angeles. I pass the Marc Jacobs booth, which is advertising a collaboration with Instagram artist @Hey_Reilly by giving out surgical masks with teeth printed on the front, with “Marc Jacobs” printed on the teeth. They’re really scary, and I don’t like them. I stop into a booth stylized to look like a convenience store (T-shirts sold in soda bottles, hoodies sold in chip bags); it belongs to the Japanese brand Conveni, which has never been to New York before. I like that one; they’re selling bandanas in triangular sandwich packaging, and the owner is kind enough to offer me a snack.

Back outside, Charlie Mejia, a 19-year-old New Yorker who came to Hypefest by himself, tells me he came specifically to buy a Pikachu sweatshirt designed by a brand called Fragment, which typically stylizes its name as “.” It sold out, so he bought a limited-edition calendar designed by manga artist Katsuhiro Otomo, and is mostly looking forward to a talk called “The Female Is Present,” hosted by Sporty and Rich founder Emily Oberg and Kendrick Lamar stylist Aleali May.

“I really want to hear women’s thoughts,” he tells me. “We don’t hear their perspectives as much.”

“I really want to hear women’s thoughts. We don’t hear their perspectives as much.”

I run into a kid named Aidan Parker, who is wearing a black denim jacket designed by Nick Holiday, the creator of the hip-hop collective Brockhampton’s early merch. I’m happy to recognize something, and ask Parker to tell me about his day and his thoughts on the Brockhampton sexual misconduct scandal, which he calls simply “uh, crazy.” He’s there with his friend A.J. Nurse, who is on the phone trying to coordinate with the rest of their friends. They run a group chat called The Stoop, sourced from the subreddit r/streetwear, made up of more than 50 people ages 16 to 34, who first met up in Union Square in June 2016. They hang out in SoHo; they are here to buy $1,700 suitcases.

There are so many boys like them — expected, and at the same time hyperreal because of how expected they are. It’s nice, I guess, that they are friends who met online.

There are also VIPs hanging out in a secluded plastic garden, and a yacht you can sign up to stand on. There’s a huge Adidas station where you can design your own shirts and sneakers or watch someone named Jack the Ripper put together shoes inside a glass box for hours on end. There is an adorable 4-year-old in a high-visibility-workwear yellow baseball cap, sucking his thumb. There is a slightly younger child waddling around all day in a full Adidas tracksuit, and I am obligated to write down that even the toddlers at Hypefest are rich and beautiful.

Axel and Chris, polite teenage friends at Hypefest Kaitlyn Tiffany/Vox

There is a teenager in Balenciaga’s Triple S sneakers and a UPenn baseball cap who drops, with zero warning, to his knees, in front of an unexplained covered wagon. He holds Drake’s favored squat pose for about 20 seconds, while his mom, wearing a navy cardigan and green Adidas Stan Smiths, waits for him without a change in expression. I don’t think anyone took his picture.

What I love about Hypefest is that even an untrained eye like mine can pick out a logo and look up how much something cost. The barrier to access for this event was just proximity to it, and the barrier to access for a community in which shopping becomes an art form in itself is just money — a lot of it.

When I sit down and force myself to find something redeeming about it all, it is the same thing that redeems anything noxious: The people are nice when addressed directly. The attendees imagined that the culture they love on the internet might represent community in real life, and for a handful of them, maybe it does — if you put your face in front of someone, they will mostly respond with warmth.

These are just people, like me, here to buy something that will make them feel better, or, barring that, to look at things they can’t afford, which will make them feel like they have a reason to try harder. All we can really dream of in America is a chance to buy something that will change our lives.

Also, for no obvious reason and with no explanation: Travis Scott did show up at Hypefest on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes faith is rewarded.

Original Source -> At Hypebeast’s new streetwear festival, even the toddlers are cool and rich

via The Conservative Brief

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