But when Rocky saw Trump on the news that night in his cell, “I was hoping it wouldn't turn for the worse.”
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. That Trump helped him get out, Rocky says, is a “misperception. But Rocky thinks Trump's involvement was a sideshow that could have easily become detrimental.
(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. 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.Īfter a three-day trial, he was released pending a verdict. “I've been locked up,” he says with a shrug when I ask if incarceration was one of his greatest fears.
Sweden represented the pinnacle of shit happening, but Rocky took his overnight transformation from adored entertainer to prisoner with remarkable ease. Pearl necklace, $6,500, by Mikimoto x Comme des Garçons. Vintage choker, $75,000, by Cartier from Stephen Russell. Headpiece (price upon request) by Paco Rabanne. Rocky’s best friend and mentor, A$AP Yams, who cofounded the A$AP Mob crew and pioneered a new kind of very online rap movement, died in 2015 of an accidental overdose. A$AP., but tragedy lurked around the corner. In 2011, when Rocky was 23, he signed a $3 million major-label deal after dropping his breakout mixtape, Live.
His professional career has also been marked by a mix of triumph and heartbreak. 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. 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. However, he had nothing but time, so he sat in his cell and sketched away. 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. 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. 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. Vintage pearl necklace (bottom) by Chanel from Vineyard Vintage. Vintage cross necklace by Cartier from FD Gallery. Pearl necklaces (top), $2,800 and $6,500 (with chain), by Mikimoto x Comme des Garçons. Vintage jeans by Levi’s from Raggedy Threads. people out there who got it better but this is a place that helps women get on their feet - with government assistance and before you know it, things are alright.”ģ.Blazer, $2,550, by Valentino. “But it’s not the end of the world because life is what you make it. “There was a lot of hard times in this place,” he said to MTV. “They moved around frequently: Harlem, the Bronx, Philadelphia and North Carolina.” “Rocky, his mom and two sisters spent time living in shelters,” reported.
Rocky’s childhood was full of instability. His brother Ricky, 20, was murdered by a rival dealer. ASAP Rocky started rapping when he was only 8-years-old. His mother Renee Black also named her daughter after that singer – her name is Erika B. ASAP Rocky attends the Moschino show during the 88 Pitti Uomo on Jin Florence, Italy.Ī$AP Rocky’s real name is Rakim Mayers, and that name choice has its roots in music.Īccording to Biography, Rocky was “born in Harlem to Barbadian parents,” and was named Rakim Mayers “after his mom’s hip-hop hero, from Eric B & Rakim.”