070 Shake Talks About Her Tomboyish Style—And Her Signature Dog Chain
Growing up in North Bergen, New Jersey, 070 Shake didn’t exactly have aspirations to become a major-label artist. “When I was a little kid in the hood just watching TV, looking at the Grammys, it’s this huge thing, [but] I just never really pictured myself in it,” she says. But after a whirlwind few years—Shake uploaded her first songs to Soundcloud just two years ago—the 20-year-old raspy-voiced rapper is now signed to GOOD Music (Kanye West’s Def Jam imprint) and has been embraced by a number of the fashion world’s underground critical darlings. Shake walked in the Fall 2017 Gypsy Sport show, strutting down the runway in a crushed red velvet dress and heavy-duty cyber-goth boots, and most recently starred in Telfar’s musical of a show alongside the likes of Dev Hynes, Kelela, and Kelsey Lu.
Following this somewhat unexpected foray into fashion, she’s now released an EP, Glitter, which encapsulates a period of healing for the artist. “I was in a very dark place and then Glitter was the process of me getting out of it,” she says. The title comes from an appreciation of the people in Shake’s life who contribute to her shine, in a sense. “I just felt like I was giving them glitter and they were giving me glitter back,” she says. “When I write music it’s kind of like I’m confronting myself. I don’t go to therapy. So when I’m writing music I’m finally confronting my issues and putting myself on the spot. Even if its uncomfortable, I just have to be real.”
This authentic-at-all-costs mentality extends to her sense of style as well. Shake didn’t necessarily care about labels or trends when she was growing up. Her friend had a connection at the local Salvation Army, so Shake and her crew would dig through bags of clothes from the thrift store each week. Given that she’s from Jersey, she does corroborate the East Coast cultural hegemony of brands like HBA and Supreme, but her hometown has also influenced her style in a more general sense. “We never really had to dress up for anything or look fancy, so it was always just street style and stuff like that. We’ve always been very free with the way we dress.”
Despite this free-form mentality, Shake does cite a few style influences. She references emo band Paramore’s Hayley Williams’s punkish looks, which perhaps explains the fact that she’s been so into platform shoes, especially the newly trendy, towering Buffalos. Aside from mixing in plaid skirts and some other ’90s-esque punk rock looks, Shake has been streamlining the color palette of her wardrobe. “I’ve been into black a lot for some reason,” she says. “That’s that New York shit rubbing off on me. I’ve always liked dressing with color, but I’ve been into long jackets and dog chains.” The latter, in particular, is quickly becoming her signature piece. “I always have to have this on me somewhere,” she says, clutching the chunky dog chain in her hands.
Shake says that her wardrobe has always leaned towards boyish, though her mother always steered her toward the girls’ section of the department store when she was a kid. And while her style reached its masculine zenith when she was in eighth grade, with a mixture of baggy pants and a purple Yankees cap that she would pull to the side, recently she’s been mixing in elements of tomboyish womenswear pieces as well. Now, as it turns out, her mother has come around to her approach—just like the rest of the culture. “She used to shop for me and I used to be scared, but now she knows what I don’t like and she accepts it,” Shake says. “Her heart is open, her mind is open, so that’s pretty cool. And just seeing how I could change her, a woman who was raised in a very strict environment, seeing how I could change her mind like that and make her a more loving, open-minded, and accepting person, I feel like that gives me some hope for the world.”
