A$AP Rocky Is Shaking Up the Room With PUMA
After rattling the German sportswear brand’s NYC flagship with a bass-bumping performance on Thursday, Flacko reflected on one year as the label’s Formula 1 creative director, his consistent sartorial vision and how his latest pieces are connected to his forthcoming album.
When A$AP Rocky first signed on as the creative director of PUMA’s Formula 1 partnership last year, he said that he wanted to “shake the room up a little bit.” On Thursday evening at the German sportswear brand’s massive New York City flagship, he very literally jolted the three-story establishment with an electric DJ set and an impromptu performance for the hoards of iPhone-flailing fans that were able to make it inside the launch party for his third collection at the collaboration’s helm. The lyrics from his 2018 track “Distorted Records” — “Big bass make the world shake / Flacko out here causin’ earthquakes” — felt especially truthful as the cultish crowd rushed down the 5th Avenue shop’s escalators to catch a glimpse of Lord Flacko himself, clattering the storefront with just as much excitement as Rocky aims to stimulate in his fashion practice. “We shook the room,” he told Hypebeast as the shop later emptied. Quite the full-circle rattle.
But when Rocky took on this role, he wanted to do more than throw a party; he saw the partnership as an opportunity to disrupt the fashion-motorsport crossover with an affordable fashion line highlighting “more of what [he] grew up on, the hip-hop side of car culture.” His vision has remained the same ever since, he revealed on the store’s top floor post-bash. “My perspective hasn’t really changed. It’s just been a crazy experience. I’m learning how to feed my inner designer to design and put out things that I believe are cool. I always think of doing things from a subversive point of view.”
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Rocky’s “eclectic taste,” in his words, is on full display in the new collection, which he said was inspired by night racing and neon lights. The collaboration’s usual high-speed graphics clamor across quilted and distressed sweatshirts inspired by racing suits, tire-treading bodysuits decorated with track-ready endorsements, and pocket T-shirts with car-key-sized storage compartments. Pleather jackets, meanwhile, flaunt the name of Flacko’s next album, DON’T BE DUMB, and a firetruck-red toolbox bag might appear familiar because it previously met the world on Rocky’s AWGE “American Sabotage” runway, where he announced the record’s initial release date during June’s Paris Fashion Week. Rocky’s music goes hand-in-hand with his design language. “Everything is cohesive,” he said.
“My upcoming music is compatible with my fashion taste. It’s compatible with the visuals that I’m creating right now. It’s compatible with my taste in general,” he added, before breaking down the simple formula behind his trend-setting agenda. “My music influenced my ‘American Sabotage’ runway. The runway influenced the visuals. The visuals influence the people.” He wants to streamline this sequence and apply it to his work at PUMA, too. But he’s secretive about how the line plays into the world of DON’T BE DUMB, the release of which has been pushed back to an undisclosed fall date. “I dropped some Easter eggs while we wait.”
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The line is also filled with new footwear offerings, including new takes on the Mostro 3.D, which utilizes an innovative resin-based 3D-printing process to create its unique, spiky facade, and the Inhale Mesh, which was re-engineered to include a mesh upper and heated flames around the Formstrip. The Inhale Distressed, meanwhile, was hand-picked from the archives and remastered with a neoprene upper, a translucent gradient sole and a Flacko logo on the tongue.
Nothing in this collection goes under the radar, and neither does Rocky, which makes sense when you consider the self-reflective advice he had to offer to young designers before jetting off: “Trends come and go, so take your life experiences and manifest them into everything that you do. When I was locked up in Sweden, I designed a whole Marine Serre collection. And when I got out, we put out a collaboration. I took something bad and ran with it. I was inspired by a Vivienne Westwood documentary because it was the only thing available in English…Take your struggle, and make it into a collection.” That’s one way to shake the room up.
A$AP Rocky’s latest PUMA collection is now available to shop on the brand’s webstore. Explore the lineup in the gallery above.
