Rico Nasty Is In Her “Simple” Style Era

Rico Nasty’s first Paris Fashion Week involved eight different outfits, four wigs, mismatched colored contacts, and multiple pairs of gargantuan insect-eye sunglasses — and this is just what she’s shared to Instagram. But when I catch the 26-year-old rapper over Zoom recently after her return to Los Angeles, she describes the wardrobe as “simple:” “I pulled back a lot,” she says from her car on her way to pick up antibiotics for what she thinks is strep that she caught on her way back. (The city “ruined [her],” she jokes, because it was “so cold” and rainy.) After years of crazy makeup and wigs on tour, she says she’s welcoming a new chapter, one where “people can see me more.”

And see they did: Nasty seemed to be everywhere, sitting in the front rows at Windowsen, Laruicci, and Vetements, shooting on the street for Rui Zhou, and performing her new song, “Arintintin,” with Boys Noize at club-of-the-moment, Silencio — a tease of their upcoming music. Her busy itinerary, compounded with the city’s “insane” traffic, meant she mastered the art of changing in a moving car, which she says she did “every single day.” (Bring a light, she advises.) Then, she got sick and spent at her hotel devouring three orders of butter chicken (“That was my boo”). Looking back, she says the experience “gave her anxiety,” because “you get all dressed up, and you're like, ‘oh my god’ this is so fun. And then you get there and you actually have to like, wear it.”

Maybe that’s a surprise to hear: Nasty has always been an avant-garde dresser — she wore platforms before they were cool and perhaps single-handedly brought the punk mohawk back. But during her last tour, she says she caught herself wondering, “Is this too weird? Are people going to hate this?” But being at fashion week ended up serving as a balm — if only because all the other risk-taking dressers confirmed “you're not the only person that puts that sh*t on.” She took that as a sign to bleach her eyebrows, to continue doing the “little things” she’s been doing for years now.

In the end, Nasty says she found kinship in the city of romance. Her stylist, Lindsey Hartman, pulled her an old Vetements runway look she once admired through her computer to wear to her first Vetements show (“I was like, ‘wow, that is perfect’”). At Windowsen, she made eye contact with two models she’s mutuals with on Instagram. She found their presence to be all the more kismet — a sign she was at the right place, at the right time. “It's so weird,” she says. “It's like bad b*tches know bad b*tches.”