How Fashion Picks Its Hip Hop Style Icons

Hello and welcome to the debrief from the business of fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BOF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm Senior Correspondent Sheena Butler Young. And I'm Executive Editor Brian Baskin.

Hip Hop is one of fashion's most powerful pipelines into pop culture. From fragrance campaigns to sneaker drops and front row placements, brands have leaned heavily on a small group of superstar artists who mostly came up during the 2010s to drive visibility and relevance.

Nobody embodies this trend more than ASAP Rocky, who is undeniably a cultural force. His collapse have run the gamut, from Puma to Rayban to Marine Sare. But as Gen Z grows more disengaged with luxury and as music charts become less predictive of cultural influence, the industry is being forced to reconsider how it

Quartz hip-hop's biggest and rising stars. B.O.F. correspondent, Leigh Takanashi joins us to unpack it all. Leigh, welcome to the debrief. Thank you, Gina and Brian.

I'm so excited to talk about this review both today. Um, you know, hip-hop's been something I've been actually covering even before I started running about fashion for B.O.F. Um, I ended up writing a lot about it for Mass Appeal Complex and I had some

clips and I'm using magazines like Fader and Pitchfork. So it's definitely a topic I'm really passionate on. I'm just talking about it. Awesome.

So let's start with ASAP. Your story sort of frames ASAP as the case study for this, the case study of hip hop meets fashion and then icon emerges. Why was he a good choice?

What was so special about ASAP? Yeah, I think what makes ASAP Rocky so special is that he's like this generational talent who's just redefined I guess artists' relationship between hip hop and fashion, right? Like hip hop is this genre that's always had these style icons every decade, you

whether it's Rakeem or Big Daddy Kane or someone like Kanye West in the 2000s and 2010s. But I think what made Ace Ibroquist so different was he came out the gate as this rapper who really declared that he was into high fashion on this breakout single, Tayso. He said that he was into Rick Owens and Raf Simons.

As a teenager growing up in New York City in the early 2010s, listening to his music, that was actually how I got introduced to some of those brands. I never considered any of those designers before. I wasn't mostly into like sneakers and streetwear brands.

Like Supreme, which has these really organic connections to that genre and music, but it wasn't like, I guess, high fashion or runway fashion, right? And he's been committed to that since he came on. And I think that's what makes him such an attractive talent for just like all these

brands today is that he has this real organic love for just runway fashion, high fashion, and also just like, you know, streetwear and like street style. So he was doing this not because the brands were paying him, at least initially, but just because he liked the brands, right?

Yeah, yeah. It was this real organic love. I mean, when he first came on to the scene in the early 2010s, he built this whole fashion segment around these like goth-esque fashion brands, just like Y-Free, Hood by Air, by

Gone Street, Ruralables, like Blackscale. And by the time release his debut album, he had this song called Fashion Killer that really just... He saw he just he used this track to just claim that he himself was like the

best dress rapper to emerge from where we now refer to as the blog era of the early 20s. I love that fashion killer video. Rihanna was in there.

Who's now the mother of his three children and their partners. How would you otherwise? So let's assume that some of our listeners have not seen DeSaparaki.

I don't know how that's possible, but like, how would you characterize this aesthetic because you, you hinted at this earlier. It sort of ran counter to what the hip hop aesthetic was presumed to be at that time. Like he had something different.

What is his look? It's so tough to say because Ace of Rock is just Ace of Rocky. But when I consider just like the history of like hip hop fashion icons, I always draw comparisons between him and Cameron.

And I know this nurse here probably aren't aware who Cameron is, but I say that because, you know, they're both from Harlem, but it feels like there's a regional undertone that runs for how Ace of Rocky dresses. dresses that feels like it's very true to New York fashion, New York style,

New York street style, basically the same way how like, you know, run DMC came out of the eighties, their whole look was basically inspired by New York City B boys that, you know, had a dress in track suits and you know,

Laces Adidas superstars like ASAP Rocky, so a challenge that same energy. I think that's what really distinguished him from someone like Pharrell or Kanye West. Like, yes, ASAP Rocky love fashion and he loved designer brands and that's always

been like consistent with the best dress rappers, But I think what kind of set him apart from everyone else is that even to this day, he's still wearing clothes that remind you exactly where he's from.

He'll come out wearing beef and broccoli, Timbalands, a really great example of this hybrid style he's built or distinguished himself with is that at the Met Gala last year, he arrived wearing this super dapper suit

that he layered it with a very big coat that had these like vocal straps on the cuffs. Anyone who grew up in New York in late 2000s and early 2010s note that's a reference to this jacket called a Marmot Biggie.

And there's a super long story behind that code that I can't get into that encourage anyone who's interested to read the article that I wrote about it for like complex like five years ago. But it's like how North Aces got popped in the 90s.

It's just a jacket that was embraced by youth of color in New York City, kids in uptown New York, the Bronx, you know, and um, Iraqi makes these like authentic callbacks to just these regional New York style trends.