This weekend, if you left home at 2 pm, like I did, you’d think everyone in Mumbai was in on some secret. It felt like half the city had the same plan. Every cab or Cityflo bus beside mine was Loudpark-bound, stacked with people in jerseys, caps, and bandanas (very blokecore) and a surprising new entrant on the gig arena: lungis.
Instagram, too, felt like an endless group chat fixated on one thing: who’s going to Rolling Loud? After over a decade of capturing hip-hop fans in Miami, LA, Portugal, and Thailand, Rolling Loud, the Lollapalooza of hip-hop folks, came to India with a gathering of thousands of fans in Navi Mumbai. Over two days, they saw Nav and Wiz Khalifa return to India, Swae Lee and Denzel Curry for the first time, and Hanumankind (back on stage after a knee surgery) and Divine take over their home base.
At 3 pm, getting in was surprisingly easy, no serpentine lines, no frantic rummaging through bags at security. The gates opened to a thin crowd with plenty of zillennials, all of whom immediately drifted towards the bar area to pre-game. By 5 pm, the numbers looked promising. The vibe shifted across two stages placed at extreme ends of a massive 126-acre field (aka Navi Mumbai’s very own Central Park), so people kept sprinting back and forth between sets. 10,000 steps? Easy-peasy.
Rolling Loud India was both a debut and an experiment: would Mumbai’s crowd show up for something that’s globally huge but still feels niche here? Short answer: yes. Cazal glasses, sweatsuits, sneakers, and painted denims—everywhere you looked there were the elements of (hip-hop) style.
On stage, British rapper Central Cee showed up in a Shiva T-shirt; off stage, it seemed American rapper Swae Lee was taking lessons in style from Hanumankind, wrapping himself in a white-and-gold mundu. On ground too, there was a crowd offering a fresh new vocabulary on hip-hop fashion. From Garuda SS shirts to Yeezys, scroll below for the fresh looks from the musical festival.
