Tyler the Creator the Fashion Rebel

Chioma Nnadi

It’s an unseasonably warm morning in late September, and the traffic around Oxford Circus, London’s central shopping district, is bumper-to-bumper. Tyler, the Creator is ensconced in the back seat of an SUV with a Louis Vuitton bag propped up beside him and a half-eaten croissant balanced on one knee. Though he doesn’t drink or do drugs, Tyler is still a little worse for wear the morning after his electrifying performance at Brixton Academy, the second of three sold-out shows in the United Kingdom. “This is what it must feel like to be hungover,” he says in his unmistakable guttural baritone. Even when he’s running on empty, Tyler’s no slouch. Today the lanky, six-foottwo rapper is dressed in a dapper workwear jacket and matching carpenter pants in khaki green and navy blue. “I actually never wear navy—it’s my third least favorite color,” he says (black ranks on the absolute bottom of this list). “But this works because of the green.” He designed the baby blue Chucks on his feet. The jewelry he has on is minimal but full of personality: a gold ring studded with a heart-shaped emerald and a beaded plastic bracelet thrown onstage by one of his fans that reads one of one. His nails are lacquered in glittery pink and green, a polish he formulated himself—“because when I can’t find the thing I want, I make it.” Same goes for his crisp floral perfume. In fact, if he had his way right now, he’d redesign the car we’re driving in. “Dark wood is gross—it sucks up all the light,” he says, shaking his head. “Like, why is this interior not white? Or cream?”

Nothing escapes Tyler’s withering eye, and as the car weaves through Piccadilly, he starts to critique the style of Londoners passing by. “I like his shirt—he should be a model,” he says, spying a tall, geeky-but-good-looking guy with a short Afro in a striped brown retro polo who is crossing the street. “It’s some weirdos out here, and I say that as a term of endearment. The other day I saw these weird tall dudes with weird haircuts and glasses. I was like, Y’all must be from a side of London where they don’t even take photographs or have Instagram. They looked sick.” Once upon a time Tyler might have befriended said weirdos, but since the chart-topping success of Igor, his Grammy-nominated fifth studio album, things have changed. Now that he’s been catapulted into an entirely new realm of stardom, striking up conversations with random strangers can attract more attention than he can handle by himself. “I need two of these guys now,” he says poking Vill, his security guard, or “husband” as Tyler jokingly refers to him. More like an older cousin than an employee,

Vill has been working with the 28-year-old rapper for the past nine years. By now he’s used to the cheeky banter, the dick jokes, to being addressed as “baby girl” from time to time.

That Tyler would then go on to write songs about falling in and out of love with men may appear like an epic plot twist to some but not to his most engaged fans. Even if you only casually follow the artist on Twitter, it’s hard to ignore the number of clues he dropped about his sexual preferences even before the infamous line about kissing white boys on “I Ain’t Got Time!”, off Flower Boy, the critically acclaimed album he released in 2017. A year prior he had posted a vibrant sketch of a rainbow-colored figure emerging from what appears to be a closet door with a speech bubble that read “Is it safe?” That followed an earlier tweet, written in his characteristic bold style: “I TRIED TO COME OUT THE DAMN CLOSET LIKE FOUR DAYS AGO AND NO ONE CARED HAHAHHAHAHA.”

Such outbursts notwithstanding, Tyler isn’t the kind to bare his soul in public. Interviewing him is a whirring dance in which he naturally takes the lead (to see his technique in action, I highly recommend watching this interview with DJ Funkmaster Flex.) He’ll steer the conversation with a stream of confusing and entertaining contradictions—example: “I mean, I’m an open person, but I’m also very private”— sometimes deflecting even the most innocuous questions with his class-clown charm and dizzy-making wit, just because he can. When pressed about the inspiration for the inexplicable Warholian Igor wig, for instance, Tyler gives no answer. In an age when oversharing has become the norm, he’s cultivated a mystique that is both rare and intoxicating, seemingly revealing everything and nothing at all. Like the most legendary rock stars of generations past—the Princes and David Bowies of the world—he is on his own planet, a one-of-a-kind creative alien; larger than life while being totally out of reach.

Despite his success, Tyler has no personal assistant and no stylist. (He scoffs at the mention of one, “I don’t even know what the fuck a stylist is.”) He packs his own suitcase, runs his own errands. That’s why we’re currently en route to Uniqlo; Tyler is running low on clean underpants. “Yo! Stop the car! You have to see this,” says Vill, gesticulating wildly towards a side street a few blocks up from the store. A petite young woman dressed in pale pink and bright red emerges seemingly out of nowhere. She’s wearing what looks like a replica of a custom suit Tyler has packed in his tour wardrobe, one of several tailored ensembles he’s been rocking as part of his Igor alter ego. All that’s missing is the kooky blond wig.

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