A$AP Ferg’s Designs on Fashion with Machine-A – BOF
Tue 9 Nov
The A$AP Mob member is relaunching fashion brand Devoni with Machine-A.
Long before his hip-hop career took off, rapper Ferg’s ambition was to become a fashion designer.
“My childhood dream was to design my own clothing line,” said Ferg. “At the time, I didn’t know it was possible. I was unusual in the sense that I was this young Black kid growing up in Harlem but at home, I was watching fashion shows and immersing myself in this world. There were no Black, male designers like Virgil Abloh to look up to back then. I’d watch documentaries on designers I looked up to, like Karl Lagerfeld and Yves Saint Laurent, but these guys came from a different world to me.”
His label, Devoni, is set to relaunch this week at London-based concept store Machine-A. The positioning in a retailer known for its fashion-forward edit of emerging labels sets the brand apart from other celebrity launches. Machine-A founder Stavros Karelis has a reputation for taking a selective and supportive approach to the emerging labels stocked by his store. Devoni will be sold alongside growing contemporary labels such as Xander Zhou, Kwaidan Editions and 1017 ALYX 9SM, as well as more established brands like Paco Rabanne, Rick Owens and Y-3.
“Ferg convinced me with his attention to detail from the material uses, through to the design and execution,” said Karelis. “He also wants Devoni to have wider benefit, with his use of vegan leather and with part of the proceeds of sales going to charitable organisations across Harlem.”
“When you work with a designer like Ferg, whilst the product is, of course, the end result, equally as important are all of the cultural aspects that surround it — the beautiful imagery and artwork, the curation, physical events and the production being local to Ferg’s community in Harlem,” said Karelis.