When Young Thug started exploding in 2014, everyone was talking about his style: how weird it was, that a dude in a dress must be gay. Now, the speculation over Thug’s sexuality has largely been eclipsed by his success, but the obsession with his genderless dress sense remains. Certainly, i-D’s still enamoured by his style, and any insight into the logic behind it is something we cherish.
The last time we heard about Thugger’s look from an insider was in an interview between Pitchfork and his stylist Joanna Zarur last year. She shared his habit of picking up dresses (and plenty other threads) from the kid’s section. Continuing she said, “Sometimes he’ll do stuff on purpose that he knows will piss people off,” explaining, “If people start talking shit about his nails being red, he’ll put crystals on the nails. Talk about his jeans, he’s like, ‘I want tighter jeans.’ He goes out of his way to make sure people know he doesn’t care.”
That interview is nearly nine months old now, and since it ran the tone of public attention has changed. Two years ago, Thugger was an outlier. His fans and detractors weren’t used to his painted nails or his painted-on jeans. But now, we’re tearing pages out of the gender rulebook left, right and centre-Jaden Smith fronted the latest Louis Vuitton women’s campaign and Hari Nef walked in Gucci’s menswear show. As a result the public’s once bemused fascination with Thugger has evolved into unbridled admiration.
Since Joanna’s conversation with Pitchfork, team Thugger’s been silent of the fashion front. That was until a few days ago, when the mixtape-a-minute rap prince jumped on Sway in the Morning to chat style. When asked to describe his look, he simply replied “impeccable”, and noted it only took him five minutes to get ready for the show because he had six women helping him get dressed. Later, he conceded his aesthetic was “going to be hard for simple-minded people to understand…I always had a weird dress code, since I was kid.”
The entire interview is worth a watch, as Thug opens up on more than style and goes into his personal history in more depth that we’ve seen before. Plus, he shouts out his upcoming mixtape.
Slime Season 3, Thugger’s fourth full-length release in 12 months, is dropping on 5 February. And when it does, let’s hope he finally gets the credit he deserves: not just as a musician, but as a sartorial visionary. Thug’s not as a fashion freak, he’s a futurist.
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Screenshot via YouTube