“The Craziest Shoe Ever”: A$AP Rocky Schools Us On His Monstrous New PUMA Collab
A$AP Rocky is a hard man to pin down. Not just because of his creative elusivity, but because he is actually, physically, hard to pin down. So much so that after hailing his latest collaboration in Germany, we had to cross the Atlantic to sit down with him two months later at Harlem’s Jimmy Jazz, New York.
The occasion? A new PUMA collab — according to Rocky when we finally came face to face, “the craziest f***** shoe ever.” This is the Mostro Disccord, a gnarly, exoskeletoned elevation of the PUMA silhouette that’s been driving the brand’s recent sales and street cred into the stratosphere. And it’s got Rocky’s fingerprints all over it.
Rocky loves the Mostro. The original iteration from the early 2000s might just be his favorite shoe in the PUMA archive (though it’s hard to be certain — after a walk through that archive with Rocky at the brand’s HQ, it’s clear he has a lot of favorites). Unsurprisingly, he loves his own take on it too: as he told us this in New York, he fiddles with his creation with renewed fascination, cracking jokes languidly to the camera. It’s nearly midnight in the closed-off retail store, and Rocky is in a playful mood. He mistakes the word “mesh” for “fishnet,” then giggles to himself. Flacko is relaxed.
“This is an evolution of the classic Mostro, but it has these elements and components that make it new and fun.” Rocky is talking specifically about the Disc feature, a fantastically engineered piece of PUMA tech taken from the Disc Blaze of the ‘90s, itself a veritable spaceship. Yes, that means no laces on the Mostro Disccord — just twist the disc, says Rocky, “to your own satisfaction and comfortability.”
In designing the new shoe, Rocky’s inspirations are somewhat surprising: he opts not for a modern fashion or artistic reference, but rather for German Expressionism. He’s channeling something dark and gothic, something “sleek and bleak” (he can never resist the rhyme). But he does put it in contemporary terms: “It feels like a very dark Tim Burton film, something like that.” (To those who stanned Rocky’s “Highjack” music video, the Burton reference will come as less of a surprise.) “You gotta f* with Batman, you gotta f*** with The Nightmare Before Christmas. That’s classic right there. My favorite of all time.”
What name to give this murky aesthetic, this ugly and delectable hybrid of the Gothic and the technological? Jon Tang, the sneaker design brains behind PUMA’s ongoing collab with Rocky, pins the Mostro Disccord’s look as “bio-grotesque.” It’s organic, it’s growth-like, its skeletal structure seems to spawn itself. Yet the materials, the textures, the moto-inspired carbon finishes, add an aggressive and mechanical edge.
Tang tells us more interesting things about sneakers than we have space to reproduce here, but he also speaks animatedly about his personal process collaborating with Rocky. “We’re nerds, and we just geek out.” It’s not just pieces, it’s contextual. “He and I are around the same age, so our references and contexts are from roughly the same era. So there’s just an understanding of these moments and culture that we both love.”
So, how would Rocky style the collab’s most recent product? Well, Flacko loves versatility: “You could rock this with a suit, you could rock this casually, you could rock it with some denims, some baggy jeans, some slim cut — like, whatever you want, whatever your preference is. That’s what I always loved about the Mostro. It was appropriate with any kind of pant you wore. And that’s what I like about these as well.”
Somewhat cheekily, we close by asking Rocky which PUMA silhouette he’d like to revamp next. His response is charming, professional: “There’s a few I wanna bring back from the vault, man, but y’all gotta see what that is. I can’t just be giving you the sneak peak too much.” As always, Rocky holds the cards — and they are close to his chest.
Shop Rocky's new PUMA Mostro Disccord here.
