Tempt Magazine

FASHION | LIFESTYLE | MUSIC

A$AP ROCKY THE ‘FASHION KILLA’ ON HIS UPBRINGING AND WHY HE BECAME KNOWN FOR BOTH RAP AND HIS STYLE.

CYRIL

HAHN ‘FACES’ EP

16.10.2013

CONTENTS 4

AZEALIA BANKS on her fame and haters

6

THE XX and their upcoming new album

9

GIVENCHY S/S 2013 GALLERY

8

12

A$AP ROCKY

15

HONEY I’M HOME The latest products from the best designers

4

6

11

The year’s most exciting rising star is a bawdy, self-styled 21-year-old rapper who wants nothing to do with rap, whose viral breakout hit is an ode to a city she’s left for good, and whose brazen ambition may be more than the music industry knows what to do with The invention of Azealia Banks, the Harlem-born rapper, actress, singer, dancer, and — maybe, someday — bona fide music-industry star, took place on November 9, 2008. Some might say it happened earlier. “They’ll forget your name soon,” Azealia Banks warns haters in her breakout Internet smash, “212.” Banks herself shouldn’t worry about fading from popculture memory anytime soon.

The 20-year-old New Yorker has proven to be one of music’s most intriguing new shape-shifters since she started posting songs and videos online a few years ago.

Fast-forward to today, and her cheeky black-and-white video for “212” has amassed more than three million-plus YouTube hits.

Page

4

What’s fresh about Banks is how she combines audacious charisma with lyrical naughtiness and genre hop-scotching: Over ultrafuturistic dance grooves, she sings like a bird (check out her glistening cover of Interpol’s “Slow Hands”) and spits rhymes like a sexpot (“I guess that cunt gettin’ eaten” goes the unforgettable hook of “212”), forging an irrepressible persona in the process. “The beats are like scripts, and the raps are my monologue,” says Banks, who studied musical theater before she took to the mike.

“At this point, I’m being scrutinized for everything.”

Her frankness also makes for good copy: Her shots at newcomer Kreayshawn made their way around the Web in January, and she’s also voiced her opinions about Nicki Minaj, a fellow outspoken female MC, and graduate of New York’s LaGuardia High School (known to most as the setting for the movie

Fame [1980]). “I don’t want to talk about Nicki Minaj anymore,” Banks groans. Understandably, Banks doesn’t want anything to mitigate her speedy trajectory.

She’s already collaborated with Paul Epworth—hitmaker for the likes of Adele and Florence + the Machine—and signed a major-label deal with Universal, which will release her debut album this fall.

Karl Lagerfeld even invited her to perform at his home in Paris at a gala celebrating the launch of his new line, Karl. It’s all been quite a journey for Banks, whose current jet-set lifestyle belies her hardscrabble beginnings as she was raised in Harlem by her mother. “Nowadays when I walk around, I get noticed, which is kind of weird,” Banks says. “It’s really just starting to hit me.

For me, a 20-year-old girl from Harlem, it’s like . . . What?”

- By MATT DIEHL Photography: Jason Nicoto

Page

5

The XX are already making progress on the follow up to 2012’s “Coexist.”

The xx are already making progress on the follow-up to 2012’s “Coexist.”

“We started writing and we’re currently trying to write on the road, which is something we’ve never been able to do,” the band’s Oliver Sim told us backstage at Coachella. “Normally, I think I need the chance to be alone and to be quiet and these are two things that don’t really exist on tour but we’ve been doing it.”

The singer/bassist revealed there are “skeletons of songs” and “bare rough demos” in the works and that the band has been utilizing their downtime at live venues to work on the new material -- “at sound checks, whenever we have time there.”

Page

6

The band is touring “indefinitely” throughout the rest of the year but is hoping to be able to head into the studio once that wraps.

While it’s too early to divulge details of the new material, Sim says the next album will feature stronger vocals by Romy Madley Croft.

“That’s one thing I can say,” The xx currently has no plans as to when they may release a new album, however, Sim explained that it could possibly be ready by 2014/2015 -- “or we might go home and have writer’s block for a couple of years,” he stated, laughing as he reached under the table to “knock on wood.”

In addition to touring, the band is busy curating their own festivals.

“There’s one in Berlin, one in Lisbon, Portugal and one in London. We’re organizing everything. We chose the venues; we’ve chosen all the bands, all the DJs, even down to the food and drinks that are being served. It’s amazing,” says Sim. The band is choosing a variety of eclectic locations for the shows including a few with great insipration for their music.

“Berlin’s going to be in an abandoned theme park, London it’s going to be in a stately home, Portugal is going to be in a castle by the water. It’s a lot of work and we’ve got people like Solange Knoles and Chromatics, Kindness… Lots of good bands playing.”

Sim also expressed his excitement over The xx being a part of “The Great Gatsby” soundtrack.

“It’s something that we’ve wanted to do for ages and Baz’s [Luhrmann] ‘Romeo & Juliet’ was one of Romy and my favorite films so we’ve been holding out and this was perfect. It was incredible. We worked with a 70-piece orchestra and Craig Armstrong who is an absolute legend in our eyes. The band will be missing the premiere due to touring obligations but plans to sneak into a theater on the road to catch a screening.”

By MATT DIEHL

Though they aren’t weighing out an American festival, Sim says he’d like to see how these three go before committing to any more.

“It’s been a lot of work,” he jokes.

Page

7

GIVENCHY SPRING SUMMER 2013 GALLERY

Religion and sex have always gone hand in hand, the basest instincts transmogrified into spirituality—even martyrdom—by ardent denial. As a good Catholic boy from Southern Italy, Riccardo Tisci has a finely tuned sense of the power and allure of both saintliness and sin, but he’s never managed to integrate them quite as successfully as he did tonight.

The setup—air thick with incense and a sonorously churchy organ to get us in an appropriately reverent mood while we sat…and sat…and sat— had the slight saveur of cheese on communion wafer, but when dozens of models poured in rapid-fire succession through a lily-bedecked archway, the sheer animal drive of Tisci’s vision crushed cynicism like a bug.

He said that “the cult of communion” was his starting point.

A brocade of a child’s communion gown could have looked innocent, but

Page

8

GIVENCHY SPRING SUMMER 2013 GALLERY

Tisci spookily printed it with vestigial faces that looked like the Shroud of Turin’s sisters. In the same way, his plays with layering and proportion would have more easily suggested priestly vestments—there was indeed a certain virtuousness in the white collar that peeked from under black coats—if they hadn’t been cut from an ice-pink duchesse satin. If the aprons and flaps also evoked Westwood and McLaren’s Clothes for Heroes, that’s only because the idea of punk priests seemed made in Tisci heaven. Punk popes too, in the papal-red details on tees printed with abstract Madonna faces.

That’s Madonna as in “Mother of Christ” rather than La Ciccone, whose current tour has brought Tisci’s clothes to the massed millions. The designer had artists reinterpret classic religious imagery to provide

Page

9

the collection’s graphic meat, the tees and sweats that have made Tisci’s work for Givenchy such a visible presence around the world.

There is some irony in that fact, given that he arrived on the scene as a precision cutter of razor-sharp tailoring. A blouson or a doublebreasted jacket layered over a long shirt is almost as much of a Tisci signature as a jumbo tee. Almost! In mere months, the Virgin Mary will be as inescapable as birds of paradise are now, and rottweilers were then.

- By Tim Blanks

Page

10

A$AP Rocky A$AP Rocky’s ferociously energetic mix tape Live.Love.A$AP quickly caught fire with hip-hop heads, music bloggers, and nominal tastemakers when he unleashed it on the world via the Internet last fall. In fact, the furor was so great that large numbers of those most standoffish of recordindustry gatekeepers—A&R people— soon found themselves frothed up and in a tizzy over the 23-yearold Harlem-bred rapper’s peculiar blend of influences, which include Southern regional hip-hop styles (like the slowed-down, doped-out beats of the Houston subgenre of screw music) and the world of high fashion (who was the last rapper to name-check Rick Owens?).

Born Rakim Mayers, Rocky endured the kind of troubled childhood that most kids don’t escape: his father went to jail in connection with selling drugs, his older brother was killed, and Rocky wound up shuffling through shelters with his mother and sister for a time. But Rocky’s single-minded confidence enabled him to not only survive, but thrive with goodhumored ease and few hints of bitterness about his past. He is part of a large uptown crew, all of whom use the first name of A$AP, which stands for Always Strive and Prosper. Until recently, he himself was dealing drugs in order to pay his bills, but he just signed a record deal with Polo

Page

11

BLAZER BY NEIL BARRETT SHIRT BY VALENTINO HAT BY BOTTEGA VENETA

Page

13

I’VE BEEN INTO FASHION SINCE BIRTH. I GREW UP IN THE ’HOOD, AND EVERYBODY IN THE ’HOOD WANTS TO COMPENSATE FOR BEING IN POVERTY, SO THEY WANT TO LOOK GOOD. —A$AP ROCKY

Page

14

Grounds Music, a label under the Sony-RCA banner, for a reported $3 million—which, for an artist whose music is rife with the steadfast ambition to uplift and transform reality, should allow him, on some level, to do just that.

“I remember one time I went to Craigslist to find something; that’s how bad I wanted it. It was a pair of Raf Simons -- this was like 2010. But Raf said he was going to make them for me,” A$AP told us.

The “Fashion Killa” rapper may have caught some heat last week when he offered a bit of misguided beauty advice. However, while it’s clear he is in no position to tell women what shade of lipstick to wear, the Harlem-born entertainer does know a thing or two about fashion. In fact it’s practically his religion.

“Fashion is almost like a religion, for me at least. I don’t give a fuck about what everybody else thinks. I’m like, I get it, I identify with it. And that’s

just it. It’s just one of those things that I’m into. I can’t help that I know it. It’s like subconsciously.”

And although A$AP might be praying to the fashion gods, that doesn’t mean he wants to join their ranks. The 24-year-old, who is currently on tour with Rihanna, says he has no plans of launching a clothing collection.

“Design my own line?

No, I just like the culture,” A$AP said.

Despite the grimy, smoky braggadocio of songs like “Purple Swag” and “Peso,” Rocky exudes an infectious positivity. When we sat down to do this interview at a photo studio in a cavernous industrial building in the South Bronx, he was wearing a more traditional hip-hop uniform: black shirt, black jeans, black boots, and a black wool hat accented by gold fronts on his lower teeth.

The only hint that he knows his Rei Kawakubo from his Yohji Yamamoto was the logo stitched on the front of his cap: COMMES des FUCKDOWN.

By DIMITRI EHRLICH

Photography GREGORY HARRIS

Page

15

HONEY I’m home Funky new products for your humble little abode!

Page

16

1

Apparatu Pleat Box - The outer part of the lamp is offered in white ceramic, underglazed red clay and grey –the result of recycling different enamels. Available in 4 sizes: diameter 47cm, 36cm, 24cm & 13cm.

Distributor: Marset

1

2

Ceramic Skull Planter $46.09 AUD. Each skull is slip cast out of ceramic stoneware and covered in a glossy white glaze. Measures approx. 4 1/2” long X 3” tall X 3” wide.

Distributor: Madpuppy

3

Authentic Handmade Mexican ACAPULCO Chair - $329 AUD. Hand made in Mexico since the 1950’s.

4

Industrial Lighting - Wire Cage Light Pendant by INDLighting - $82.64 AUD.

5

Matt Blatt Replica collection. Prices range from $158 AUD to $1599 AUD.

2

3

4 Page

17

black water getblk.com

RR II CC KK OO W W EE NN SS SPRING SUMMER COLLECTION 2014 OUT NOW

THE XX | DUKE DUMONT | AZEALIA BANKS ALUNAGEORGE | DISCLOSURE RUFUS | TÂCHES | TNGHT ViLLΛGE | XXYYXX | PURITY RING