“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.

Complex thank me later album art