HOMECOMING, Nigeria's premiere cultural moment, gets all the best merch. In 2022, the festival debuted collaborations with everyone from Off-White™ to Cactus Plant Flea Market and the 2023 HOMECOMING collabs hit no less hard.
Held the first weekend of April 2023, HOMECOMING is to Lagos what Coachella is to Palm Springs, except infinitely more cultured and considered.
This year, like every year, there were panels interspersed with performances from some of music's biggest up-and-comers — HOMECOMING 2023 featured Spotify Nigeria record-breaker ODUMODUBLVCK, Ayra Starr, and Odunsi The Engine (last year's edition featured recent Highsnobiety cover star Central Cee).
Another big draw, obviously, is the merch. HOMECOMING knows what it's doing here, so much so that it's opening a permanent space within Lagos boutique Alara, where it'll presumably offer some well-curated goods from affiliated brands.
2023 brings a swath of new labels into HOMECOMING's fold, including Stüssy, Casablanca, AWAKE NY, longtime HOMECOMING peer Patta, AMBUSH, and Drake's Nike-affiliated imprint NOCTA, to name a few big partnerships.
Given that NOCTA in particular doesn't really do collaborations, pretty impressive gets all around. Just goes to show HOMECOMING's relevance.
Exclusively revealed to Highsnobiety, the HOMECOMING 2023 collection will soon be available via HOMECOMING's web store, though festival attendees got first dibs over the weekend, as you'd expect.
All of the aforementioned brands are at the height of their creative powers, with labels like Stüssy currently redefining the demarcations of a contemporary clothing brand while brands like Casablanca further smudge the line delineating "streetwear" and "luxury" fashion, a nebulous descriptor that's already on unsteady legs.
On the contrast, HOMECOMING feels like it's coming along as strong as ever.
To return to the Coachella connection, setting aside culture and quality of conversations happening therein, HOMECOMING is handily winning the merch game, as you can tell. Coachella ain't getting exclusives from the world's biggest brands, that's for sure.
