A$AP Rocky Is the Prettiest Man Alive

When A$AP Rocky was in a Swedish jail, the sun never really set. It was July 2019, and Rocky was being held in pretrial detention on an assault charge stemming from a street fight in Stockholm with a few young men who had been following and harassing him and his crew. For a month, he was, he says, confined to a single-person cell for 23 and a half hours a day. He found it hard to sleep. During the high summer in Stockholm, the sun is out for about 18 hours a day. For the other six, dusk melts into dawn. At night, as this eerie twilight spilled through his cell window, Rocky kept the TV on; the background noise of Swedish-language news helped lull him to sleep. But about a week before he expected to get out, a sound on the TV jolted Rocky awake.

“Even though it was in Swedish, I heard ‘President Donald Trump’ and ‘A$AP Rocky,’ and I woke up out of my sleep,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ ”

That’s how Rocky learned that the president had become the most prominent supporter of the #FreeRocky cause. The news was reporting that Trump tweeted that he had spoken with Kanye West about Rocky’s incarceration and that he would be calling the Swedish prime minister about the situation. The following day, the president tweeted that he would personally vouch for Rocky’s bail. On the list of Trump’s priorities, freeing Rocky seemed to be somewhere up there with building the wall and complaining about CNN.

Suddenly, A$AP Rocky—a relentlessly charismatic artist whose favorite canvas is the mosh pit, a norm-busting style icon, a singularly charming man who could tease a smile out of a gargoyle—had been inadvertently thrust into the center of an international diplomatic incident.

Of course, one had to wonder about the president’s motives for embroiling himself in the plight of the jailed rapper. To many of Rocky’s fans and supporters, Trump’s opportunistic interest felt like a ploy to win over Black voters. (“Sweden has let our African American Community down in the United States,” Trump tweeted at one point.) They weren’t wrong: According to an American diplomat who later testified about an exchange he heard between Trump and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the E.U. at the time, Sondland advised the president to sit tight until Rocky was sentenced to a Swedish jail term, then take action. “Let him get sentenced, play the racism card, give him a ticker-tape when he comes home,” Sondland allegedly told Trump.

Rocky, meanwhile, knew nothing of the behind-the-scenes machinations. He was alone in a tiny cell, in a Midsommar dusk, following along on a TV he could hardly understand.

He may have been restricted, but A$AP Rocky possesses an energy that can’t be contained. Before his arrest, he had been on tour, which is where he feels the most alive. His shows are designed to smash people together, to make them dance and fight and lose themselves in oblivion, and Rocky feeds off the madness, frequently diving from the stage into the chaos he has created, slam dancing and crowd surfing with the kids who show up to rave with him. Putting him in a prison cell is like trying to harness an out-of-control nuclear reaction. He’s not good at sitting still.

So he kept himself busy. He worked out. He prayed. And true to form as one of music’s most advanced fashion tastemakers, he designed a collection on spec for buzzy Parisian designer Marine Serre.

Rocky had been a fan of Serre’s conceptual regenerative streetwear for a few years, and one day in his cell, he began to conceive the outline for a collaboration. He got a pen and paper, which he used to sketch out the idea of a dress that looks imported from a dystopian future: Picture a vintage T-shirt, stretched and elongated, then finished with a kilt-like hem and a Jedi master hood. He didn’t know if the discerning Parisian designer would agree to work with AWGE, Rocky’s creative agency that functions as a platform for his fashion projects. However, he had nothing but time, so he sat in his cell and sketched away.

If being stuck in a Swedish jail and suddenly part of Trump’s agenda sounds to you like an unusual position for someone to be in, it wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar scenario to Rocky. At the age of 16, he spent two weeks in Rikers Island for firing a gun at a neighborhood bully in Harlem, where he grew up. His professional career has also been marked by a mix of triumph and heartbreak. In 2011, when Rocky was 23, he signed a $3 million major-label deal after dropping his breakout mixtape, Live. Love. A$AP., but tragedy lurked around the corner. Rocky’s best friend and mentor, A$AP Yams, who cofounded the A$AP Mob crew and pioneered a new kind of very online rap movement, died in 2015 of an accidental overdose.

Rocky has learned to wear his scars well. In fact, he bears two actual scars on his otherwise flawless face: The tiny one on his left cheek is the result of a fight from when he was 15. The origin of the scar on the right side, a spindly tear that stretches from the corner of his mouth to his jawline—Rocky used to hide it under silk Gucci scarves, launching a “babushka boy” trend—is murkier. When asked how he got the scar, he often made up stories, like falling off his scooter or being slapped by an auntie with long nails, but in Swedish court, when explaining why he has a security detail, Rocky mentioned he had been slashed the previous year. Even now, he’s cryptic about the incident. “I think shit happens,” he tells me. “And that night, shit happened.”

Sweden represented the pinnacle of shit happening, but Rocky took his overnight transformation from adored entertainer to prisoner with remarkable ease. “I’ve been locked up,” he says with a shrug when I ask if incarceration was one of his greatest fears. The Nordic prison food was “trash,” according to Rocky, and the experience of being in near total isolation for a month was “probably the most boring thing you could think of.” But Rocky prefers to look on the bright side: Kronoberg remand prison, he recalls, was much cleaner than Rikers.

After a three-day trial, he was released pending a verdict. (He was eventually found guilty and given a two-year conditional sentence that imposed no further jail time.) The trial featured an unlikely guest at the behest of Trump: one of the administration’s top hostage envoys, who was otherwise tasked with freeing Americans held in places like Afghanistan and Syria. But Rocky thinks Trump’s involvement was a sideshow that could have easily become detrimental. That Trump helped him get out, Rocky says, is a “misperception. He didn’t help—he made efforts and he rooted for me to come home, but he didn’t free me.” When Trump started tweeting, Rocky says, the Swedes had told him he’d likely be out in about a week, and he worried the president’s messages would make them find a reason to keep him locked up even longer, “because they felt like they had a point to prove because he kept saying stuff.… We knew what was going to happen, and it happened the same way they said it would weeks prior,” he says. But when Rocky saw Trump on the news that night in his cell, “I was hoping it wouldn’t turn for the worse.”

In the ensuing weeks, allies of the president started complaining that Rocky didn’t deliver a public statement of gratitude. Despite his perceived silence, and his fears that he’d be punished due to Trump’s ham-fisted Twitter diplomacy, Rocky was indeed grateful. He told the president so on a private phone call. “I was mad thankful that he did that, because he didn’t have to!” Rocky says of Trump. “He took the time out of his day.” The support he received from the president and others, he says, “made me happy while being in there, because when you in jail, you feel like nobody cares. You can get lost, and you feel soulless. Like, you feel low, bro.”

When Rocky got out, he flew home to L.A., and then soon after, rather than take a victory lap or do what most Americans imprisoned abroad tend to do upon their release, which is to stay put in the States for a little while, he jetted to Paris to have coffee with Serre so he could propose turning his jailhouse dream of a collaboration into a reality.

“I was not expecting anything,” says Serre of their meeting, but the 29-year-old designer was immediately struck by Rocky’s familiarity with garment construction. “He brought me some scarves that he did himself, and I liked the fact that he really knew how to stitch and how to understand the material. And then basically it was just an exchange—ego was not really there,” Serre says. So they got to work. “It was quite natural and easy, and clearly not all collaborations are like that today.” The collection, which includes clingy nylon tops encrusted with upcycled chains, an oversized puffer made with deadstock leather, and those dark, frilly dresses, each constructed from 11 different vintage graphic tees, came out at the end of last year.

When Rocky was locked up, Tyler, the Creator, declared that from then on Sweden was off-limits: “no more Sweden for me, ever” he tweeted. The likes of Schoolboy Q and Lil Yachty agreed. Rocky, on the other hand, stayed away for all of four months after his release. In December he returned to Stockholm, intending to perform for the inmates at the jail he was previously housed in. After being rebuffed by the authorities, he had to settle for an arena show that people from the city’s immigrant neighborhoods could attend for free.

When I ask if he’d be down to go back to Sweden on his next tour, Rocky scoffs. “I’d be down to go back in general!”

When we meet at a rooftop bar in West Hollywood on a sunny afternoon in April, pandemic restrictions are starting to loosen and Rocky has just returned to L.A. after several weeks away. He’s spent the past year or so mostly out of the public eye, but his style—today he’s in an AWGE x Needles track jacket, Kapital Kountry jeans, Nike Dunks, and a pearl-studded belt he found at a tiny shop on Ludlow Street in New York City—is as prominent as ever. A vintage Esso trucker hat covers his short braids, and when he smiles, as he does often, he flashes a gold cap on a canine that’s emblazoned with a tooth-size Mickey Mouse. A waiter, not recognizing Rocky, asks him if he’s a rock star.

He’s had a place in L.A. since 2012, the year after “Purple Swag” and “Peso” established him as the next big thing from NYC. He carried himself like a rock star back then too: He certainly partied like one, and he looked like one, with a Hendrix-like slinkiness and a taste for the avant-garde fashion worlds of Rick Owens and Raf Simons. His musical output was similarly curated. Though today hip-hop is a post-regional genre, at the time Rocky was a radical and controversial artist for the way, under Yams’s guidance, he mixed sounds and styles from New York and down south. Atlanta and Houston were hot. New York’s hip-hop scene was tepid. Rakim Mayers set things on fire.

Even when he’s in L.A., Rocky still moves like a New Yorker. He has a Ferrari and two Mercedes, but he prefers walking, taking Ubers, and riding an e-bike. He spins around his neighborhood to relax, to clear his mind, to see what people are wearing. In NYC, all he has to do to see what styles are popping in the streets is step outside; in L.A., he hops on his bike to seek it out.

Rocky’s lockdown year was spent seeking out something even more important: himself. “I’ve been experimenting in every field,” he says over chamomile tea with honey. “I’ve been experimenting with style, with rhythm, with sonics, film, food, health, love, life—for real.” As the world slowed down, he finally had time to “find out more about me,” he says. He discovered that he’s changing: “I’m converted to the change. New-world shit.” After a stint with sobriety in 2019, last year Rocky returned to smoking copious amounts of kush and dropping LSD, which aided this journey of mind expansion and self-discovery.

“I’m stoned as fuck,” he adds with a sheepish grin soon after sinking deep into the couch next to me. His dream blunt rotation? Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor. “I wanna laugh with Richard Pryor,” he says. “You smoke with him, it’s over. It’s over.”

Change, Rocky is saying, is good. In his love life, though, the change Rocky has experienced is drastic. It’s change in the same way that a Mega Millions lottery winner experiences change. Because A$AP Rocky is dating Rihanna.

Rocky knows he probably shouldn’t talk about Rihanna, the triple-A-list pop star, wildly successful fashion and beauty entrepreneur, and Category 5 cultural hurricane, but he can’t help himself. As soon as I bring her up, he starts beaming like a teenager whose crush just accepted his prom invite. I could practically hear the angels singing. “The love of my life,” he calls her. “My lady.”

The exact timeline of their relationship is uncertain, and Rocky won’t divulge many details. Rumors about their status began circulating as early as 2013, when Rocky opened for Rihanna’s Diamonds World Tour. You can see why the global pop culture apparatus and the duo’s combined hundred million fans—most of them hers, to be fair—have been attempting to speak their union into existence. They’re both insanely hot. They’ve both got culture-shifting side hustles. They’re both fashion oracles. Their coupling feels predestined.

What’s it like to be in a relationship?

“So much better,” Rocky replies without hesitation. “So much better when you got the One. She amounts to probably, like, a million of the other ones.” New-world shit, indeed. Rocky is among our culture’s most unabashed ladies’ men, but he says he’s comfortable embracing monogamy: “I think when you know, you know. She’s the One.”

Around Christmas last year, Rocky was photographed with Rihanna in Barbados, where Rocky—whose father emigrated from Barbados to the U.S.—immediately felt a sense of belonging. “It was like a homecoming thing,” he says. “It was crazy. I always imagined what it would be like for my dad, before he came to America. And I got to visit those places, and believe it or not, there was something nostalgic about it. It was foreign but familiar.”

I ask A$AP Rocky if he’s ready to be a father. “If that’s in my destiny, absolutely,” he replies. “I think I’m already a dad! All these motherfuckers are already my sons—whatchu talkin’ ’bout!” He laughs and then starts choosing his words carefully: “Nah, but like, I think I’d be an incredible, remarkably, overall amazing dad. I would have a very fly child. Very.”

For most people, the COVID year was a time of stasis, of hunkering down. But Rocky lives to tour. So last summer, for the first time together since 2013, Rocky and Rihanna went on a tour of sorts. The couple commandeered a massive tour bus and drove from L.A. to NYC, swinging south through Texas and stopping in Memphis and a half dozen other cities along the way. But they didn’t play any shows. Instead, they threw themselves into the tradition of the Great American Road Trip. They listened to the Stones, the Grateful Dead, and Curtis Mayfield. They stopped in a few national parks. Rocky dropped acid and made his own clothes, beatnik-style—sewing, patching, and tie-dyeing shirts and pants on the bus.

When I ask Rocky whom he met while on the road, he takes a moment to think. “I met myself,” he says. One can understand why: Not since Sweden had Rocky had this much time for himself. And he’d never been able to be so free and unburdened while with his lady. “Being able to drive and do a tour without feeling like it was an occupation or an obligated job agreement, I feel like that experience is like none other,” Rocky recalls. “I never experienced nothing like it.”

Most enticingly for A$AP Rocky fans, he recorded new music along the way. He says he’s over working in proper recording studios, which he considers too big and boring. On the road, he had a mobile setup so he could make music as inspiration struck. “Work with what you got,” Rocky says of his scrappy DIY approach, a style of composing that has only increased his confidence that what he’s creating is the best music of his career. “God blessed me with a lot, so I’m working with that, and that’s enough to make some fuckin’ fire.”

Rocky’s growth as an artist in the past decade has been all about chasing new sounds, often by working with unexpected collaborators and occasionally at the expense of fans who think a Harlem MC named after Rakim should be rapping over rap beats. His last album, 2018’s Testing, reflected a heady period of musical experimentation and included a sample of Moby’s proto-chillwave track “Porcelain,” a duet with FKA Twigs, and a very Frank Ocean-y track featuring Frank Ocean. After two albums that reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, Testing only reached No. 6 and was met with mixed reviews, and while on tour back in January 2019, Rocky told me he was “emotionally discouraged” because he felt like listeners didn’t get it. But rather than resorting to calling up the surefire producers of the moment and pursuing what people supposedly want right now, Rocky’s resolve to continue confounding expectations has only increased in the ensuing years.

“It’s all about the evolution,” he says of his approach to his long-anticipated new record, tentatively titled All Smiles. “If I’m still doing the same shit with the same sounds and the same bars and the same visuals from years ago, what’s the point? You got that catalog. You can go revisit that.” He says he occasionally reads what critics say about his music but tries not to pay attention to it: “I don’t think that’s really my concern. I’d be confused, man. I just want to make some good music, that’s all. I want to feel great about doing it, and I want people to feel great about hearing it.”

Two new important creative partners are likely to be found on All Smiles. The first is Morrissey.

Morrissey! Rocky, it turns out, is a huge fan, and he’s been working remotely with the Pope of Mope over the past year. The former Smiths frontman has been writing, producing, and contributing vocals to the new record, Rocky says. “Anything you need him to do, he show up and do.”

The second is his road trip companion. Though hesitant to reveal the extent of their collaboration, Rocky hints that Rihanna is listening to and responding to his new work: “I think it’s important to have somebody that you can bounce those creative juices and ideas off of.” Rihanna, he assures, has “absolutely” influenced the new music. “It’s just a different point of view.”

Rocky hints that the very fact of his being in a relationship has defined the vibe of the new material. He calls All Smiles a “ghetto love tale” and says that it’s “way more mature” compared with his previous work, which in content is about as mature as anything coming from a 20-something who brags about their sexual conquests and sick outfits can be. When Rocky decides to drop the album, which he estimates is about 90 percent complete when we speak, it could usher in a radical new phase in his life: Rocky the romantic.

A$AP Rocky remembers exactly when he discovered that style was in his blood. “I was probably five or six, and I started crying because my mom wanted to dress me for Easter and I wanted to pick out the clothes myself,” he recalls. “I ain’t like how I looked. I was crying ’cause I was mad there was nothing I could do.” His family knew better than to try to put the genie back in the bottle. “From that point, they started letting me do my own thing.”

Rocky likes to tells stories like this when his childhood in New York comes up, about his parents buying him pint-size Jordans when he was barely old enough to walk, about him wearing Gucci to his fourth-birthday party. He describes his style as completely innate, more like an instinct than a set of well-developed aesthetic values. But as he grew older and life got a little rougher, he found that immersing himself into the worlds of luxury fashion and streetwear presented a powerful form of escapism.

In high school, in the early 2000s, Rocky became a regular presence at downtown boutiques like Prohibit, which sold Japanese denim to the hip-hop stars of the day, and the shop for the dark streetwear brand Black Scale, which helped outfit the A$AP Mob for his “Peso” music video—spots where it wasn’t weird to be a pretty boy who rocked skinny jeans. Rocky’s taste in fashion is what got him into the Mob in the first place. A buddy of his from high school, A$AP Relli, was an early Mob member who rocked Margiela and Gucci thanks to the proceeds from a successful drug-dealing operation. Rocky recognized a fellow traveler and befriended him, and Relli started bringing him to Mob hangouts. Once he was in, Rocky proceeded to transform the crew into a potent force in the fashion world.

One of their earliest statements was making purses look hard, over a decade before bright Birkins and Louis Vuitton crossbodies became hip-hop’s most ubiquitous accessories. “People weren’t wearing satchels when I came in the game, I can promise you that,” Rocky says. “But we was wearing those, because that’s what you trap in. You put your weed in there, you put your money in there, you put your pistol in there, you put your MetroCard in there, you put your lean in there.” At a time when the rise of social media was scrambling menswear’s signals, Rocky knew of a way to seize control: “Anything that’s supposed to be considered something to emasculate you, we figured out how to make it macho.”

Before Harry Styles started sporting intricate manicures, Rocky was getting his nails tricked out with smiley faces and messages to his haters (“FUCK” and “OFF” are recurring motifs) and encouraging other men to give it a shot. Rocky’s red-carpet get-down, meanwhile, was to show up dripping like a rich grandmother, with a silk scarf jauntily knotted around his head as casually as a hoodie, a pile of pearls swinging from his neck, and a lacy blouse, buttoned low. If that doesn’t sound particularly radical today, that’s because Rocky’s been carrying the flag at the front of menswear’s charge toward more fluid silhouettes and accessories since Instagram was invented. In fact, a decade before he wore a kilt on the cover of GQ, he wore one in Harlem. “I got called the worst of the worst,” he recalls about his skirted debut in 2011. Did he care? “C’mon!” he replies with a sneer. Guys in his neighborhood might have made fun of him, but as he once recalled, he was sleeping with their girlfriends.

“The nails, the kilts, the pretty-boy swag, the pearls—I think it’s just being comfortable,” he says. “I just express myself with fashion, and what’s fly is fly. I do it on some punk shit.”

Like the similarly fashion-obsessed Kanye West and Frank Ocean, Rocky has parlayed his status and fame and style into a gate-crashing multidimensional artistic practice. He is an actor, having appeared in 2018’s Monster, which follows a 17-year-old honor student on trial for involvement in a murder in Harlem. He is a designer who is as comfortable overhauling his favorite Needles track pants as he is creating stilettos with Amina Muaddi, as he did last year. His dream collaboration, he tells me, would not be in music or fashion but with A24, the cool-guy Hollywood film distributor behind 2019’s Waves, one of Rocky’s favorite films—a relentlessly gripping and profoundly vibey picture that vividly reflects Rocky’s own creative priorities.

“This shit is more than just rap for me,” he says. “I’m into design, I’m into detail, I’m into elevated taste value.”

Nothing—not money, not fame, not the prospect of top chart positions or gold Grammys or other traditional metrics of musical success—gets Rocky out of bed like the pursuit of elevated taste value. Anything can have elevated taste value, and to Rocky, it’s painfully obvious when something, especially an outfit, does not. “It’s a lot of tacky motherfuckers out here,” he says about his jawnz-obsessed peers in the hip-hop world. “Just ’cause shit be costing a tag on it and all that, that shit don’t make it jiggy, bro. That shit don’t make that shit fleek.” To Rocky, whose closet is full of “pieces” rather than mere clothes, fashion is a competitive sport, and he’s well on his way to the Hall of Fame.

If you wear a good fit around Rocky, he’ll remember it for the rest of his life. Ask him to tell a story from a night out in Harlem a decade ago and he’ll start by listing what everyone wore, down to the shoelaces. “I never really met too many people who can do that,” he says. “It’s kind of odd.” If your fit is wack, though, it won’t get any real estate in his brain. “I look right past people if there’s nothing enticing.”

Rocky’s fashion projects have a much smaller audience than his music does, but his impact on the fashion world has arguably been more profound. He claims to be the inspiration behind DJ collective turned streetwear brand Been Trill, which helped launch the fashion careers of Matthew Williams, Virgil Abloh, and Heron Preston, the first two of which are now among the most powerful American designers in Paris, and the third has a new creative directorship at Calvin Klein. He was an early booster of Shayne Oliver’s provocative Hood By Air label, which continues to influence avant-garde streetwear. He has impeccable taste in collaborators to this day, often working with designers and brands—Marine Serre, Jonathan Anderson, Japanese hippie-streetwear label Needles—just before they blast off into the stratosphere.

As a result, Rocky’s imprimatur on a garment instantly makes fashion insiders pay attention, and designers look to him for approval and endorsement. He was the first Black face of Dior Homme, helped to lead the rollout of Raf Simons’s collections for Calvin Klein, and, as I write this, is all over the internet in Gucci ads with Iggy Pop and Tyler, the Creator. Given his style-god status among late-millennial and Gen Z fashion freaks, Rocky’s co-sign is downright crucial.

After the successes of Kanye West’s Yeezy imprint and the pastel-hued Golf Wang label belonging to Tyler, the Creator, is Rocky planning to launch a full-fledged brand of his own? “Right now I’m not eager to do that,” he says, citing the impact of the COVID pandemic on retail. “Maybe next year, but who knows?” At the moment he’s content being one of the industry’s most bankable collaborators. “I really wanted to put myself in a position where I made a collaborative brand as opposed to being a brand that puts out shit just for the sake of accumulating capital,” he says. Again: elevated taste value. “I’m all about making money!” he says. “But I want to do it in the right, fly way.”

Save for a collaboration with Guess, most of Rocky’s fashion projects have been niche—like “custom Prada nylon tracksuits for a tour” niche—and expensive, to the point where Rocky is worried his fans are left out of a hugely important side of his artistry. Soon, he says, there will be a release with Vans that should satisfy that concern, though he’s not at all interested in making it for the masses. He speaks of the new sneakers like he’s completely reinvented the slip-on and says that the quantity released is going to be “exclusive.” (Elevated! Taste! Value!)

Rocky and Rihanna try not to be photographed together by the paparazzi. No problem when they’re road-tripping through Texas, but in L.A. these things are unavoidable. A few nights after we talked, Rocky joined Rihanna at West Hollywood celebrity hang Delilah, his first trip to a club since before the pandemic started. Rihanna arrived first, slipping into a private dining room. Rocky followed several minutes later, as if perhaps his presence was coincidental. Well after the rest of L.A. had gone to sleep, he and Rihanna left separately but got in the same car.

On a Zoom call a few days later, I ask Rocky about the outfit he wore that night—a black leather trucker jacket, black Rick Owens boots, and black leather pants from his Marine Serre collaboration. A fit that originated during one of his bleakest moments, it was now worn during one of his happiest and most triumphant, waltzing out of a club with one of the coolest, most beautiful and successful women in the world, all while half pretending he isn’t really living this particular dream at all.

What’s it like to now wear pieces of clothing that you dreamed up in jail?

Rocky’s sitting in his garden in front of a fountain. He takes a drag from a joint the size of a Cohiba and leans back. “I was definitely on that cot just thinking, How will this ever come to fruition? How will I execute this? I hope I can execute this,” he says. “And God is good, bro. God is good. For real.

“Honestly,” he continues, “I never thought that things that I imagined while I was in jail would come true. And everything that I envisioned in prison came to fruition. ‘Cause I guess I manifested it. And I prayed! I really wanted to bless that situation and move on from it in a positive way. I was praying to stay strong, and God got me through shit like it was nothing! That shit was nothing.”

It was nothing, and now it’s everything. When not even a month in solitary can suppress your creative zeal, your irrepressible confidence, your deep faith, the world on the other side looks like yours for the taking. Things that might have terrified Rocky a few years ago—like a relationship—are new opportunities to embrace change, to discover who he really is. Every morning when he gets dressed, Rocky can remember how he turned one of his lowest moments into one of his highest. He puffs on the joint and pauses, his face bathed in the golden afternoon light. In solitary confinement, he says, “I was thinking ’bout designs. And to see the clothes when I’m out—that shit is beautiful, bro.”

Samuel Hine is GQ’s senior associate editor.

A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2021 issue with the title “Pretty.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photograph by Inez and Vinoodh
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Ty Mosby
Skin by Dick Page for Statement Artists
Manicure by Naomi Yasuda for MA World Group
Tailoring by Martin Keehn
Contributing Stylist, Matthew Henson
Produced by VLM Productions