LUPE FIASCO AKA MR. FNF

LUPE BREAKS DOWN HIS PERSONAL STYLE ANS DESIGN




FRAGMENT DESIGNS

“Hiroshi Fujiwara is the king—Fragment only does collaborations, so he works with Levi’s, Nike, Burton, Neighborhood. It’s that Japanese attention to detail. Look at some of his pieces and you can search around for the parts and zippers and buttons and things. Everything is so well thought-out.”

NIGO

“Nigo’s another influence—not really for the fashion, but for the empire-building that he does. I love his whole empire. But I don’t necessarily agree with everything that he makes. I’ll wear Bape, but the Bape I wear is all black.”

MONOCLE

“Is that odd, to big up another magazine? The aesthetic is amazing. It’s the only magazine that I get that I don’t even read—I just go through it and look at the pictures. And there’s barely pictures in there!”

DR. ROMANELLI

“Dr. Romanelli is the mad scientist. We know him from his reconstructions. He’s a collaborator, but his specialty is he collaborates time. He’ll collaborate that era with this era: bring this from the past, reinvent it and bring it into the future. And the level that he does it, especially an American, it’s—well, you can’t even call it cut and sew, it’s more technical, a whole other art form.”

DAMIEN HIRST

“I don’t like Takashi Murakami, Andy Warhol, Basquiat. I don’t like the things that are the status quo, that people say like, ‘Yo, this is such and such.’ I’m impressed by Damien Hirst, the feats that he does to execute his art in the world. His works with animals and taxidermy and stuff like that, like that stuff is hard to do. It’s just off-the-bat impressive.”

FALSE

“There’s a brand called False from Singapore that my friends Le Messie and Amanda run—they make everything by hand, screen all the T-shirts, everything. Brands can change their names over the years; they had many different faces, so I got their whole chronology. All their brands and T-shirts—I keep the collection in boxes.”

BANKSY

“Banksy impresses me. Banksy’s art is used—you can use it. It’s a muse for change. It makes a statement. Like the painting of a cat playing with a ball of yarn on one end of the city, and the yarn ball unwound through the entire city and when you got to the end, it was a little girl about to plug it into the wall. And it speaks of cruelty and how we’re entertained by cruelty. You see one first, ‘Oh, that’s so nice.’ And then you see the end of it, so it creates those change in thoughts.”

GILLES PETERSON

“If I could have someone DJ my life, it would be Gilles. He’s one of the coolest guys I’ve ever met—cool like you want to be him. You know how you watch a movie and you’re like, ‘Man, Johnny Depp was wild in that movie, I’ma act just like Johnny Depp from here on out’? Gilles is one of those guys.”

UNKLE

“The original was James Lavelle and DJ Shadow, and they created a phenomenal first album called Psyence Fiction, then they split ways. Lavelle and Richard File released two other albums, Never, Never, Land and War Stories. It’s phenomenal—what they do, how they move.”