Exclusive: A$AP Rocky Tells the Story Behind His New Under Armour Sneaker
If anyone not named Kanye West is responsible for the decade-long love affair between high fashion and hip-hop, it’s A$AP Rocky. The Harlem rapper was shouting out Raf Simons and Rick Owens long before those designers were household names, and even longer before those same brands made sure he had first access to their newest wares. So it was more than a little surprising when the leader of the A$AP mob, showed the world his very first sneaker back in May—and it looked a whole lot like a much-maligned, 20-year-old skate shoe, the ultra-chunky, tongue-heavy Osiris D3. While peers like ‘Ye Big Sean, Pusha T, and Pharrell had jumped headlong into sneaker design, Rocky, ever the iconoclast, had taken his time...and rebooted a vintage skate shoe?
As Rocky explains over the phone, there is—as usual—more to the story than sneaker blogs would have you believe. He remembered seeing the D3 in the wild, back in the early aughts. “It was years back, man, maybe '01. People really hated them in the hood,” he said. Rocky, being Rocky, loved them: “It just seemed a hybrid of different sneakers mixed in one. You got a Nike Air sole, a hiking boot at the top of it. The D3 reminds me of the Charles Barkley, some Air Maxes and a pair of Jordans. That's what I love about it.” He had little company. “It was seen in passing by skaters here and there, but predominantly, there were no people really rocking that shit in the hood whatsoever,” Rocky explains.
But fashion, the idea goes, moves in 20-year cycles. And conveniently enough, the things that made the D3 so gnarly when it came out in 1998—all that foam, a multi-tier sole, a real propensity to fuck up your entire outfit—also happen to be the things that, in the right combination, make for a perfect sneaker in 2018. “If you think about what Demna [Gvasalia] does with Balenciaga, if you think about what Raf Simons does with his shoes, if you think about even Kanye with the Yeezys, it's all infusions of soles that wouldn't traditionally be appropriate for the body of a sneaker, and color ways that don't really match—but actually make a perfect picture,” Rocky says. Sneakers in 2018 are judged primarily by how large and ugly they are—and by that measure, the D3 was about 20 years ahead of its time.
So when Rocky and Under Armour sat down to talk shop, he knew exactly what he wanted. “I already knew the design I wanted to do. I kinda wanted to reconstruct the body. It's almost like if you get a vintage television or game console or arcade game and you just refurbish it, that's what I did.” That is, on one condition, Rocky says: “I didn't want to do too much without actually having Dave involved.”
Dave is former pro skater Dave Mayhew. More importantly, Mayhew is also the guy who designed the D3 in the first place. He’s on the call, too, and between my questions, Rocky and Dave sweetly trade compliments. Rocky makes it very clear that this wouldn’t have happened without Dave; Dave knows it wouldn’t have happened without Rocky calling him up out of the blue. “Initially I worked on the shoe decades ago,” Mayhew explains. “I was just living my life, and out of nowhere got contacted by Under Armor. They wanted me to get together with Rocky and just kinda discuss the whole thing. At first I was a little hesitant, just because [the D3 is] kind of a gift and a curse for me.” But they got together, hit it off, and decided to bring the monster back—or the spirit of it—in a new way.
To explain Rocky’s sneaker (official name: the AWGE X Under Armour SRLo), it helps to understand the D3’s history. Mayhew skated for Osiris in the ‘90s; the D3, released in 1998, was his third shoe for the skate footwear purveyor. “The initial design came from me touring around and being in tons of skate shops,” he recalls. “And when you would look at a wall of the sneakers and stuff, there just wasn't something that stood out. That's how this whole design came about. I wanted something that stood out off the wall.”
The D3 stood out, and then some: whether to stand up to the gnarlier tricks skaters were doing, or to anchor the rave- and rap-inspired baggy pants they were wearing, skate shoes of the era were massive—none more so than the D3. It left an outsize cultural footprint, too. “The shoe initially started off in the skate market and did fairly well,” Mayhew says. “Once a couple of big-name people started wearing the shoe, it just exploded. In literally every town you go to you see people wearing them. The funny thing is, people don't like ‘em, yet they're still around.” Yeah, that: as Nike and Adidas entered (and swiftly dominated) the skate world, packing conglomerate-grade technology into classic, quiet sneakers, the D3 felt out of place. Fred Durst’s affinity for the shoe might not have helped.
As far as Rocky’s concerned, that means now is the perfect time to bring it back. “It's about 20 years since Dave did the design, which allows it to be considered vintage,” Rocky says. “I feel like since vintage is so appreciated right now, I'm just playing off that and giving people something that they might have missed out on 20 years ago.” (Here, Mayhew pipes up: “I think you just called me vintage!”)
The new shoe gives the D3 a rough-and-tumble fashion-goth upgrade: it comes in all-black and black-and-white colorways, with quite possibly even more sole than its inspiration. The SRLo gets proprietary Under Armour cushioning, and reflective laces. As Rocky puts it: “With just new revised improvements and different knick-knacks and tricks here and there, hidden shit.”
But despite their provenance, Rocky doesn’t plan to skate in his. (“You know god damn well I can't skate! I'm not trying to have a real Lupe Fiasco moment.”) Instead, he says, “it's targeted to be a rave sneaker more than anything, because I don't really like lounges and clubs. If you ask anybody, I don't even dress club appropriate half the time. If it wasn't for my celebrity, I probably wouldn't even have access! If you want to go mosh, if you want to slamdance, if you want to jump on people's backs and shit, this is the perfect shoe for that. You know what I'm saying? This is for fucking skate raving. Most of my friends skate any goddamn way. So it all works out.”
Fittingly, Rocky’s releasing the shoe at a pop-up skate rave he’s throwing with UA this Friday in Harlem. And again, because Rocky is Rocky—and because only 250 pairs of each colorway will be available, at $250 a pop—the sneakers are guaranteed to move fast. Rocky, though, would be just as happy if they were as polarizing as the D3s. When I ask how the shoes fit into the broader sneaker landscape, he’s incensed. “I mean, hopefully it doesn't” fit in, he says. “Shit, I don't want to do anything that fits man! We outcasts over here, bro.” This, he says, is par for the course. He’ll just go on setting trends, and the rest of us will give him a hard time—and then, a few years down the road, find ourselves finally riding his wave. “Usually that's the case with me,” he says. “You got people talking about, ‘L$D’ is amazing. Thank you, man, that was three years ago. You know?”
