“Complex: Why do you think hip-hop is so fascinated with fashion and vice versa?
A$AP ROCKY: As black people it was our thing to show that we’re not living in poverty and that we can afford extravagant things—that kind of stuck with us. So when our great-grandparents were putting on their favorite outfits, it was to put on a front for the hard time. And hip-hop is a bunch of people that never had nothing. Fashion is just an expression. It’s an art. It expresses your taste. Good taste is important in hip-hop. I wake up saying I’m going to look the best I can and do what the fuck I want to do. And that’s what it’s all about. I don’t know if I articulated it good because im pretty high right now—and I have a lisp and I’m going to Mars right now.
Jeremy Scott: [Laughs]. The thing is hip-hop is one of the only communities that really started its own trends.
A$AP ROCKY: Wow.
Jeremy Scott: That’s why I’ve always been inspired by hip-hop artists, because they transform things—even just the jean, turning it around, inside out, sagging it—all these different things. Yes, of course we get little things from other music movements, but hip-hip has been like, Pow! It’s really inspiring and it’s the only new music that has come along in eons. Rock and roll has been around—it’s changing forms. But hip-hip is major.”
