This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.
A$AP Rocky, Chanel ambassador, has rarely been seen in public wearing anything but Matthieu Blazy-designed blazers for the past few months. But on Thursday evening, the rapper, actor, and fashion impresario was comparatively dressed down in a zip-up hoodie he designed for AWGE, the clothing line that sprung out of his record label and creative agency in 2024.
Rocky was in a warehouse-like basement a stone’s throw from New York’s City Hall, prepping for his third AWGE runway show, set to be held upstairs the following night. The 37-year-old paced back and forth along rails heaving with AWGE-branded clothes, and stroked his chin as he reviewed models’ outfits. At one point, he disappeared into a changing room and emerged wearing khaki trousers covered in cargo pockets; he had decided to lend his own AWGE sweatpants for one of the looks.
“It’s like putting out an album,” he said of his eleventh-hour tinkering. “It’s not done until it’s out.”
Until he finally dropped the long-awaited Don’t Be Dumb last month, Rocky spent years batting away “Where is the album?” questions and fighting leaks of unreleased music. So you can see why he’s been thinking a lot about process. “People don’t appreciate process anymore,” Rocky said. “They don’t trust the process, and I just want to expose it.” Rocky was planning to recreate the fine-tuning I was witnessing here during the show, with styling assistants and glam teams doing their finishing touches on the cast in the middle of the catwalk. “We want the viewers to see all of the revisions we’re making up until the very last second.”
Rocky has been making even bigger changes to the AWGE formula in the lead-up to the brand’s New York Fashion Week debut. The first two shows, held in Paris, were extensions of the punk-ish and politically-charged aesthetic Rocky was exploring at the time; the most recent collection, titled “Obligatory Fashion,” riffed on the uniforms of courtrooms and the criminal justice system, a reference to the legal drama he overcame in early 2025. Though there was plenty to like about the clothes, which reflected Rocky’s immense influence in crashing conceptual European fashion with fine tailoring and streetwear, so far AWGE has yet to hit stores.
“They say the third time’s the charm, right?” Rocky said with a smile. From what I could see backstage, this go-round was less about narrative and more about teasing out a real wardrobe from his current style proclivities. He cited the contemporary obsession with quiet luxury and wellness, and his own curious interest in “aquaticwear.” “That’s untapped territory,” he declared. “I wanted to challenge us.” It struck me as a remix that only a style oracle as confident as Rocky could pull off.
“I had a bunch of trials and tribulations that I needed to get out of the way before I could really soar” with the brand, he said. “Now I can express myself freely and creatively. Emphasis on the word free.”
But still—aquaticwear? The racks of made-in-Italy tailoring looked promising (Rocky is as responsible as anyone for the resurgence of ’80s power suiting), but I wasn’t sure what to make of the liquidy latex shirts and piles of aqua sock Puma slides and swim-goggle-like Ray-Bans in the mix.
