From the cover of Food & Liquor, it was plain to see that Lupe Fiasco wasn’t plain to see. He had a neatly defined style, like his music, of past meets future. Black suits with colorful sneakers. Retro jackets with nouveau digital watches. Holy scarves with gold plated glasses. The list goes on, but it helped defined a Pop culture icon as visual as he was musical. As Lupe Fiasco will tell you, this vision was developed over years in the mind of a Chicago artist.

The Evil Collector sits down with “Carrera Lu” to talk about this early vision, digital time-pieces and his Trilly and Truly clothing line that he’s using to collaborate more than Lil Wayne or Bun B. Like Case said in the film Style Wars, it appears that Lupe Fiasco has styles that haven’t even been born yet.

The Evil Collector: Will money always translate to style. When does it and when does it not?
Lupe Fiasco: Nah, it won’t. ‘Cause certain style, some of it, comes from poverty. It comes from taking what you have and making the best out of it. You have to be an imaginative person to make things rock and develop a style all of your own. Sometimes you’ll never reach that. You might not be able to afford every single pair of Dunks or every Louis Vuitton bag, so you’ve got to find a way where your own personal kind of style shines through, you’re matching things up and what-have-you. Sometimes money will hold you back, it can hurt you. Sometimes you’ll see people out there with nothing but some expensive bullshit. Some kid will come up with a suit, simple and plain, and a style all his own, and just kill ‘em.

TEC: In the HipHopDX feature, you mentioned Marlon Brando. After A Streetcar Named Desire, the sale of white undershirts skyrocketed. Do you think today that style moves faster than it did 20, 30, 50 years ago?
LF: Yeah, definitely. ‘Cause there’s a lot more of it. There’s a lot more style, a lot more integration. You think back to those white shirts in an era when the church ruled the world. Anybody that went out of that going to church, going away from church were rebels, the ones wearing blue jeans. Now you’ve got so many ways to rebel, and style and fashion. You can be vanguard or somebody coutre or what have you. There are so many people wanting to voice themselves and put it on display, even if it’s just a blog or a brand. All that opinion, all that information is out. So it’s definitely kind of moving quicker. You’ll even forget about some of the stuff you saw before. Some of the stronger brands still break through. Levi still breaks through. Nike still breaks through.

TEC: How has traveling influenced your fashion sensibility?
LF: Honestly, it’s more utilitarian and taught me to be more simple. Because traveling, if you really travel, it takes a toll on you. Sometimes the less bags you have…the lighter the move the better the move. When you pack, you pack with a purpose. Style becomes simple or concentrated. Like, so what’s the most powerful thing I can have? Black. So I’m just gonna do black. Black shoes. Black suits. It becomes focused on a certain point, and it just gets crazy because it starts to pile everything onto that one point. That’s better than, “I need this color and that color, this color and that color.” Monochromatic. Too much color destroys it. Even Dior. It’s just one, destroying it.

TEC: What’s good with your line as of late?
LF: We’re in a collaborative stage right now. We’re collaborating with Dr. Romanelli, we’re collaborating with Swagger…we’re coming out with mini-brands per season. This season was called “Fall of Rome,” which delivers in December. I’m actually going into a sub-brand. Leather goods. Really expensive stuff, really nice. Truly and truly is coming soon. We’re getting our samples and our designs and our logos, and I want it to be really good.

TEC: You were the first artist that brought digital watches back into the foray. Why do you favor the digital watch and where do you see this trend going?
LF: I don’t know. I had a context in my head of myself – a construct of myself. I always saw myself as, “Okay, I’m gonna have a digital Timex. I’m gonna have a vintage green Porsche Carrera.” Carrera Lu is my alter-ego kind of thing. That was just a part of it – the digital watch. I’ve done had Rolexes and all that, the real expensive stuff, but the simplicity and the utilitarian of it, I rock with digital. It just started out as something to look for. I’d go to certain cities and see what they had. There’s expensive ones, cheap ones; I just like the Casio a lot. It’s classic. There’s some crazy new ones though too. I liked the digital look because it was like futuristic, but also had a past era about it. It was future meets past, and that’s cool.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 11:44 am and is filed under Interview, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.