The speed with which hip-hop and high fashion
have become enamored of each other is staggering.
Increasingly, it is impossible to speak about one without
invoking the other.
From one direction, rappers like ASAP Rocky; Lil Uzi Vert;
Tyler, the Creator and more have become style luminaries, fearless
adopters of forward-looking self-presentation. At the same time, the
shapes of high-end men’s wear have been morphing, taking in silhouettes
borrowed from street wear and the hip-hop style of the 1990s.
This union is the end result of decades of flirtation between the two worlds, dating
back to Dapper Dan’s luxury bootlegs, with stops at the jiggy era of the mid-to-late
’90s and the Japanese street wear influence of the late 2000s. All those moments setthe table for what now seems inevitable: Hip-hop is dictating the tone of men’s fash-
ion at the highest levels.
The current family tree in many ways begins with Kanye West, who long
agitated for embrace by the luxury fashion world before creating his own
Yeezy clothing line and teaming with Adidas on ravenously received
sneakers.
Many of the high-end designers currently thriving are
West’s spiritual children. Virgil Abloh, the artistic director
of Louis Vuitton’s men’s wear and founder of his own
label, Off-White, was for many years West’s cre-
ative director and right-hand man. Heron
Preston, head of his own namesake label,By JON CARAMANICALines of Succession
GIONCARLO VALENTINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESFrom left: Du of
Bstroy, Ev Bravado
(on the floor),
Brick of Bstroy,
Bloody Osiris and
Tremaine Emory.Hip-hop’s next generation of haute-street-wear innovators.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019D1
NFASHION BEAUTY NIGHTLIFE
You are likely either to know at least two or
otherwise none of the following things
about Misha Nonoo:- She is a clothing designer.
- She is a part of that sliver of society
whose members constitute what is known
as “society”: that is, people whose personal
milestones are often honored by private
performances from world-famous musi-
cians, but who are not themselves world fa-
mous or musicians. - She is a close friend of Meghan, Duch-
ess of Sussex, and is considered a plausible
candidate to have set up Prince Harry and
the former Meghan Markle, who have said
they met on a blind date.
If you knew none of that, you are even
less likely to correctly guess the pronuncia-
tion of her surname: noo-noo.
“When you’ve grown up with a name as
absurd as mine — Misha Nonoo, which, it
really is — I mean, it’s absurd,” she said,
tucking into an outdoor lunch at a New York
City French brasserie. “It is kind of charac-
ter building.”
Ms. Nonoo, 33, who grew up in London,
was born in Bahrain to an English mother
and an Iraqi-Jewish father. (The Nonoos
are a prominent Jewish family in Bahrain.
Her cousin Houda Nonoo was the first Jew-
ish ambassador posted abroad by any Arab
country, in 2008, when Bahrain’s Jewish
population numbered 36 individuals.) Her
surname is a transliteration of an Arabic
term Ms. Nonoo translates as “little one.”
According to Nonoo family lore, the word
was so widely used to refer to a diminutive
several-greats-grandfather that it just “be-came the family name, if you can believe it.”
Ms. Nonoo estimated that someone gets it
wrong “pretty much” every day.
Ms. Nonoo does not normally discuss her
friendship with the Duchess of Sussex. (She
could not recall having done so in public
since Ms. Markle’s engagement was an-
nounced.) While she said she had never
been asked not to share details about Ms.
Markle, it could be observed that she spoke
of her on that summer afternoon with the
cordial nonchalance of someone who had
been granted special dispensation to do so,
and also that she retained her own digital
record of the conversation.
Up for discussion was her charitable col-
laboration with Ms. Markle, announced in
the September issue of British Vogue. It’s a
work wear capsule collection from three
British retailers (Marks & Spencer, John
Lewis & Partners, and Jigsaw) and Ms.
Nonoo, who works in New York.
For each item bought, another one would
be donated to Smart Works, an organization
that provides clothing and interview train-
ing to unemployed women re-entering the
work force. The collection would, in Ms.
Markle’s words, per British Vogue, offer
wardrobe options more universal in design
and appropriateness than “a potpourri of
mismatched sizes and colours, not always
the right stylistic choices or range of sizes”
assembled from donations alone.Duchess
And Friend,
Working
Together
CONTINUED ON PAGE D8By CAITY WEAVERANDREW WHITE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAn alliance with a royal comes with few
restrictions for the designer Misha Nonoo.
Misha Nonoo has collaborated
with Meghan, Duchess of
Sussex, on a capsule collection.New York
Fashion Week
10-11REVIEWS
From the runway:
Proenza Schouler,
Pyer Moss and more.
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN8 A DEBUTZendaya with a collection
and a platform. BY GUY TREBAY
9 NO REGRETSAlicia Keys, Offset and the
party scene. BY BEN WIDDICOMBE
CONTINUED ON PAGE D6