ComplexCon Turns 10, Leaves Las Vegas, and Lands 300 Brands in a Convention Center
The streetwear festival's anniversary edition swaps the Strip for Los Angeles, with Playboi Carti and Hiroshi Fujiwara running creative.
ComplexCon marked its tenth year on October 3 and 4 by leaving its longtime home on the Las Vegas Strip for the Los Angeles Convention Center and Crypto.com Arena, a bigger stage for an event that has outgrown casino conference rooms. Playboi Carti and Fragment Design's Hiroshi Fujiwara served as artistic directors, with Fujiwara contributing exclusive collaborations that touched Disney and Pokémon alongside the usual streetwear suspects.
More than 300 brands spread across half a million square feet, including Nike, Fear of God, Gallery Dept., BAPE, Palm Angels, and Vans, several of which used the weekend to drop sneaker collaborations found nowhere else. ThriftCon ran alongside it with more than 100 vintage dealers across 100,000 square feet, and a 30-plus-restaurant food festival filled in the gaps between panels and performances from Ken Carson on Saturday and Playboi Carti on Sunday.
Trading Vegas's casino-adjacent sprawl for a convention center in the middle of Los Angeles is a bet that ComplexCon's audience was never really there for the Strip. Ten years in, the event has become less a trade show and more a brand-marketing fixture that hundreds of companies pay to be inside of, which is its own kind of anniversary gift.
Source: PR Newswire
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
