If there’s one person not named Kanye West to blame for the ten-year romance between hip-hop and luxury fashion, it’s A$AP Rocky. Long before Rick Owens and Raf Simons became well-known designers, and even longer before those same labels made sure he got early access to their newest creations, the Harlem rapper began calling out these designers. Therefore, it came as a bit of a surprise when the A$AP gang leader unveiled his debut sneaker to the public in May. It bore a striking resemblance to the much criticized Osiris D3, a 20-year-old skate shoe. Rocky, ever the iconoclast, had taken his time and, in contrast to peers like ‘Ye Big Sean, Pusha T, and Pharrell, had gone headlong into sneaker design. What happened when Rocky revived a vintage skate shoe?

 

 

 

There is, as always, more to the tale than sneaker blogs would have you believe, as Rocky clarifies over the phone. In the early aughts, he recalled seeing the D3 in the wild. “Man, that was years ago—maybe even ’01.” In the hood, people truly detested them,” he remarked. As always, Rocky was smitten with them, saying, “It just seemed like a hybrid of different sneakers mixed in one.” At the top is a hiking boot with a Nike Air sole. The D3 makes me think of the Jordans, the Charles Barkley, and a few Air Maxes. That’s why I find it so appealing. He wasn’t very busy. In general, Rocky says, “there were no people really rocking that shit in the hood whatsoever,” although he did occasionally see skaters going by.

 

However, the theory states that fashion changes every 20 years. And ironically, the very features that made the D3 so iconic when it debuted in 1998—tons of foam, a multi-tier sole, and a genuine tendency to ruin your whole look—also happen to be the features that, when combined, create the ideal shoe for 2018. “When you consider what Demna [Gvasalia] does for Balenciaga, what Raf Simons does for his shoes, or even Kanye with the Yeezys, you realize that it’s all about incorporating soles that aren’t typically appropriate for the sneaker’s body and using color schemes that don’t really match but yet create a perfect image,” Rocky says. The main criteria used to evaluate sneakers in 2018 is size and ugliness, and the D3 was roughly two decades ahead of its time in those aspects.