Adidas’ ‘Future’ Party Shut Down: It Needn’t Have Been.

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Adidas Originals held a free party last week in Shanghai, with a strong lineup featuring by-now Shanghai regular ToKiMoNsTA, Pusha-T , Alesso and Fader One.

It did not go well.

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Overcapacity (reports suggest the venue had twice as many people as it could accommodate) and poor crowd control meant the police turned up in full force, shutting things down barely 5 minutes into Pusha T’s set. Things got ugly – lots of reported altercations.

The event was put together by ‘experiential marketing’ company APAX.

The anger afterwards was swift and merciless. A Wechat ‘Sight’ of folks dumping their Adidas shoes into a trashcan went viral, reposted among the hundreds of music groups across the platform.  

 

This could have been avoided easily.

China has a paradoxical rule when it comes to those of us who work in the ‘alternative culture’ space:

Make your underground events professional, and your space to operate expands.

What that means is, once you’re past China’s cultural police, the actual police have only pragmatic concerns: safety, security, order. The authorities fear what they can’t understand (we’ve seen too many security personnel have conniptions at witnessing a moshpit).

For the most part, keep your block parties, after-parties, gigs and showcases professional, and the ‘alternative’ slowly becomes less of a threat. It’s disappointing that the fundamentals of event management were lax here – and this specific crackdown, as it so often does in China, may lead to more down the line.

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