Moments of total, complete, unclouded clarity come rarely in a person’s life. But I was moved to one on Saturday night while standing on a yacht covered in brown vinyl dotted with the monogram of leather goods brand MCM. A man with a goatee wearing an Off-White shirt was laying on a cushion on the deck making his best this-shit-is-regular-to-me face for an iPhone camera. The message of this unsettling tableau was not subtle. Go home, it said.

The yacht was docked at Hypefest—a sort of Comic-Con, hosted by the publication Hypebeast, for streetwear enthusiasts. But instead of spandex Spiderman suits, attendees—mostly male, mostly in their teens and twenties—were costumed in every single impressive grail they owned. Some 10,000 people gathered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard to interact with the many brands—including Off-White, Alyx, Adidas, John Elliott, Puma, and toymaker Medicom—that had set up booths to sell clothes or offer experiences, like piecing together an Adidas shoe. They came to watch performances from Jaden Smith and up-and-coming rappers Sheck Wes and Trippie Redd. And they came simply to mingle amongst other people who’d be interested in all of the above.

All of this was free, so long as you were fast enough to grab tickets when they released last month. The rush for tickets surely delighted the brands hoping to reach this group of young, fashion-savvy guys. “A big thing for us in getting involved in Hypefest was really trying to partner with Lacoste to change the way people are looking at a brand that's so preppy,” Chinatown Market founder Mike Cherman told me, explaining his joint booth with the French brand.

Everything I read and heard about the event beforehand inspired existential dread: a whole day with thousands of teens whose interest in fashion is predicated on what they see on Instagram, and whose grandest aspirations are to be one of the people who has an account everyone else will look at one day. Even the name, HypeFest, made me shiver. But despite all that seemed to be working against it, I thought there might be something more at the center of Hypefest.

Upscale charter buses ferried guests from the entry point to the actual festival: a stage and two warehouses, basically. Onstage, Kerwin Frost, who dabbles in DJing and design and has a lot of Instagram followers, was headbanging vigorously. The one on the right housed booths for brands like Heron Preston and the joint Chinatown Market-Lacoste operation, as well as a massive adidas buildout where attendees could construct their own shoes. (The actor Jonah Hill would participate later in the day.)