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As the clock nears midnight on a Monday evening in early April, A$AP Rocky is in an enormous production studio near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn doing what creative directors do.
“Act like you know each other. I need y’all to swag this out,” the rapper says to a half-dozen 20-something models who had, apparently, not been swagging out appropriately. “This is Frank Lucas at the boxing match. We got money. It's Harlem. Aight? Fellas, get it together.”
We’re on the set of A$AP Rocky’s first full campaign as the official creative director of Puma’s partnership with Formula 1. His initial responsibilities, announced last October, include designing and launching limited-edition clothing collections around a handful of F1 races, starting with this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix. On the one hand, it’s an unexpected pairing. Rocky didn’t grow up worshiping F1; he was more into what he calls ghetto car culture, and didn’t start following the sport until recently. “I know Lewis Hamilton personally,” he says, “but I know him from just being A$AP Rocky.” On the other hand, the skirt-wearing, pearl-dripping Harlem native is the reigning boundary-breaking style maverick of our time. He’s got a Midas touch that can make anything cool. “Formula 1,” Rocky says, “is really keeping up with the times, and it’s very versatile. I fuck with that.”
When it comes to the clothes, A$AP Rocky’s design process is simple: make stuff that he wants to wear. The debut A$AP Rocky x Puma collection is a heady combination of motorsport’s greasily glamorous motifs, AWGE (his creative agency) iconography, and Rocky’s own vibe of attitudinal luxury. There’s a sweatsuit printed like petrol-stained racing overalls, and tees emblazoned with six-point seatbelts. What looks like a logo-covered red crash helmet from afar is really a padded, oversized balaclava. A racy sneaker silhouette that Rocky personally selected from the Puma archive is a remixed version of the Inhale, originally launched in 2000. The collection represents, as Rocky explains, “what a Formula 1 driver's swag should look like.”
That’s the easy part. “It's not like we're over here making couture or anything,” Rocky says. It’s everything else that keeps him up at night. Rocky has been hinting at serious ambitions in the film world for years, and directs many of his own music videos. For Puma, he is doing it all: writing, directing, and scoring the commercial, casting the look book, overseeing the styling and beauty, coaching the photographers and models, and making the millions of other decisions that go into a sprawling four-day production. “The way I approach directing a commercial, it's no different from a music video, or a photo shoot, for that matter,” he tells me as staccato flashbulbs bounce off his large black leather bomber and denim shorts, both emblazoned with Puma’s leaping cat logo—garments from an unspecified future release.
It’s an approach you might call obsessive but that he describes as “particular.” As the models start posing for a photographer and videographer—but with more swagger this time—Rocky has one eye on the action while he fields granular questions from the wig stylist and simultaneously participates in this interview. There are so many people around that you’d think Christopher Nolan was shooting Tenet II. “For me, it's all about trying to make sure that we have fun. But in addition to having fun, we actually execute,” he continues. “Nobody can read my mind. Nobody's in my brain, so they don't really know my expectations of execution. So I have to be involved.”
Later, he compares himself to a couple of his favorite auteurs. “I'm Jiggy Tarantino,” he says. “I'm Him Burton.”
Rocky had been in front of the camera earlier in the day, too, and his perfectly braided hair is green, his face coated in thick smudges of Robert Smith eyeliner. Some of the models are also wearing makeup that falls somewhere between glam and ghoulish. There’s also a futuristic hi-res video structure in one room glowing with AI-generated vistas, and a noirish living room with toys strewn around. Elsewhere I stumble across several diminutive electric-model Ferraris that I was told go 60 mph and cost six figures, and set pieces that look like back alleys Jack Skellington would skulk around. It’s like the fertile landscape of Rocky’s highly animated imagination.
Despite these visual clues, I can’t totally make sense of the idea behind the campaign. I’m trying to picture an AWGE music video, whereas Rocky is thinking about the Criterion Channel.
Rocky has been obsessed, he tells me, with German Expressionist cinema, and has been deeply influenced by the shadowy, surreal themes of the Weimar era. As he’s evolved as a director, he’s combined the moody, dark aesthetics of films like Fritz Lang’s 1927 gothic sci-fi film Metropolis with the ghetto futurism that informs his personal style. “Ghetto futurism,” he says, “is when you see me wearing three pairs of jeans with three pairs of boxers, but it’s all one pair of jeans,” as he did at Coachella last month. “Ghetto futurism,” he continues, “is André 3000.”
Rocky calls this distinct visual style “GRIM,” a portmanteau of “ghetto expressionism.”
Fans have speculated for years about the meaning of GRIM, which Rocky has dropped in leaked ad-libs and in a freestyle title. It’s now thought to be the title of his long-awaited fourth album. As for the obsession with German Expressionism, it started, he tells me, with Tim Burton, who was heavily influenced by the art movement. “I grew up on Tim Burton,” Rocky says. “My favorite film, one of them, is The Nightmare Before Christmas. That's my shit.”
The rapper is committed to GRIM like David Bowie was to Ziggy Stardust. It’s part alter-ego, part avant-garde artistic statement, part 360-degree campaign concept and likely album theme. He wears a massive, iced-out GRIM belt buckle of his own design around the waist of his jorts. (It reportedly cost $322,000.) The day before, the crew had shot a part of the campaign that involved a bunch of childhood toys coming to life. Rocky posed for photos in a painstakingly applied prosthetic mask that turned his famously pretty visage into something resembling the unsettlingly severe subject of an Erich Heckel painting. A recent Fenty Beauty commercial starring Rocky and Rihanna was full film noir.
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Though he’s been keeping GRIM close to his chest, the time has clearly come for Rocky, ever wary of industry copycats, to claim his territory. “I need you to get familiar with what it is,” he says, “so you can identify when these motherfuckers start biting, man.” But on the subject of that album, Rocky won’t divulge any secrets. He’s sick of leaks, he says, and isn’t interested in floating release dates that he might not hit. “While they’re wondering what's next, I'm just in the background, secretly perfecting shit. I'm ready to just show and prove as opposed to just talking.”
But Rocky can’t help talking a little talk. When I ask him to elaborate on his plans for Puma footwear, he reminds me about his long history of sneaker trends. He was one of the first rappers to legitimize designer sneakers in streetwear culture, and fully takes credit for reviving the Adidas Samba, now one of the Three Stripes’ most popular sneakers. “I don't want to sound arrogant, but if you look around and you see Sambas, there's only one person who brought those back, real talk,” Rocky tells me.
“But I don't want to talk about the ops,” he says. “Now that I'm with the [Puma] fam, I need to find their heritage, their origin, what derived from what, what’s in their archive.” (His partner, Rihanna, also has a creative director deal with Puma.) He’s already helped relaunch the Y2K mainstay Puma Mostro, and hints at what might be coming next when a PA walks by wearing a pair of vintage Puma Palermos, an ’80s indoor soccer shoe. “The Palermo—that’s the Samba on crack,” he says.
Puma has even more plans for Rocky, plans that could shape the future of the company’s motorsport business. Puma produces performance gear for several Formula 1 teams, and is the exclusive supplier of F1 gear at all 24 races around the world. According to Puma, by 2025 Rocky’s signature could be felt in everything the brand makes for F1—from the Ferrari cap you might buy at a Monaco merch stand to, potentially, the fireproof overalls Lewis Hamilton pulls on before jumping in his car. Rocky’s already got big ideas brewing. “I feel like their uniforms could be more updated or revised,” he says of the drivers.
The hour is late, and Rocky needs to make sure his team nails a few final shots before they wrap for the day. He needs to keep perfecting shit. By way of goodbye before he runs back over to keep coaching the models, Rocky invokes the comparison he made earlier. “I’m Him Burton,” he says. “You feel me?”
