Kendrick Lamar is having a big year. After sweeping the Grammys on Sunday — his Drake diss track ‘Not Like Us’ took home five awards — the rapper is gearing up to host this week’s Super Bowl half-time show, poised to be one of the year’s biggest nights in music.
As he stacks up accolades, the rapper is also taking more risks with his fashion. And the Super Bowl is set to be a major fashion moment, providing a big opportunity for luxury brands to engage with audiences across platforms and locations.
Raising the bar
Lamar, who in the early part of his career adopted a uniform of white printed tees and distressed jeans, has been stepping up. It’s clear when comparing the cover of his 2017 album Damn — where he’s pictured in a simple white T-shirt — to his latest album GNX, released last November. The recent artwork captures the star in a Balenciaga jacket, a Martine Rose T-shirt and a belt made of vintage pins from LA-based brand ERL. The rapper has also been spotted donning tracksuits from New York talent Willy Chavarria and his Super Bowl merch collaboration, which launched this week.
Lamar’s style renaissance can be partially credited to his collaboration with stylist Taylor McNeill, beginning 2020. McNeill has worked with some of fashion’s most powerful tastemakers, from Timothée Chalamet to Charli XCX. But more importantly, it’s about his growing cultural impact. Lamar sits in an elite category of established — but still disruptive — musicians, whether that’s through speaking out on racism or women’s rights or dropping four diss tracks in six days during his summer 2024 feud with Drake. Lamar attended the Grammys in a Maison Margiela double-denim look — a Canadian tuxedo, perhaps another dig at Canadian-born Drake.
“[Lamar] seems to understand that when you have a grip on culture and you have your foot on its neck [you need to make the most of it],” says Larry Schlossman, co-host of leading menswear podcast ‘Throwing Fits’, which recently named Lamar the second most stylish celebrity of 2024, based on its end-of-year audience poll, ‘The Fitties’. He moved up eight points, from 10th the year prior.
Spotlighting emerging talents
Lamar’s popularity as an artist translates directly into visibility and sales for brands. After he wore the ERL belt on the cover of GNX, the response was “insanely overwhelming”, says ERL founder Eli Russell Linnetz. “The amount of attention it received was wild.” The brand gained around 30,000 Instagram followers overnight and saw an uptick in orders for the belts, which Russell Linnetz makes by hand, from other clients.
Meanwhile, Complex reported that the Willy Chavarria tracksuit Lamar wore in the video for ‘Not Like Us’ sold out at great speed, prompting the brand to restock. Lamar also wears a tracksuit top, cargo pants and a leather jacket by Martine Rose in the video, which garnered approximately $555,000 in media impact value (or MIV, the monetary value of social media interactions, article mentions and posts) for the brand, according to brand performance agency Launchmetrics.
The rapper has long admired Rose. Their relationship dates back to 2022, when the designer dressed Lamar for dates on his Big Steppers tour. In response, Lamar wiped his entire Instagram feed for a blurry image of Rose and the caption: “Bucketlist to work with Martine Rose, she camera shy but gangsta say hello to my young.” Rose has since dressed the star many times, and is referenced in the lyrics of his 2023 song ‘The Hillbillies’. The duo also collaborated on a range of merch around the song released in November of that year. Speaking to Vogue at the time, Rose praised the commonality between them: “His work is rooted in people’s experience and that’s the way I approach collections, too. It’s fragments of things that feel real. And so we jumped at the chance to design merchandise. Like ‘Erm, Yes!’”
Schlossman and ‘Throwing Fits’ co-host James Harris say the rapper’s impact for independent brands is in part due to his ever-growing GOAT rapper status, which makes more experimental brands digestible for a broader menswear consumer. “Martine Rose is not an easy brand to wear, Wales Bonner is not an easy brand to wear,” says Harris. “To see [Lamar] wear it in a contemporary, masculine way that is still very LA, still very hip hop, is pretty valuable.”
Alongside independent fashion favourites Rose and Chavarria, the ‘Not Like Us’ video features newer, lesser known brands Kaló Soil and Ghetto Rodeo. For these labels, the impact has been significant. Los Angeles brand Kaló Soil, launched in 2024 by Hunter J Baker, say their follower count increased by 20,000 following the video. “We were able to sell a lot of hats, we were able to sell a lot of hoodies [the items worn in the video],” Baker says. “It gave us a jump-start.” Baker has since reissued the hat, with the proceeds going to Vintage Church Malibu, to help those affected by the LA wildfires.
Ghetto Rodeo’s Brian Saucedo, meanwhile, says the brand’s Instagram follower count has grown by around 15,000. The hat that Lamar wears — actually a collaboration with Kaló Soil — had not previously been put into production, but that changed with the video. “We sold around 500 units,” Saucedo says. “We could have sold more, but I didn’t want us to get overwhelmed.” Following a restock, a further 500 were snapped up.
Saucedo says that along with the bump in sales and profile, there is a wider symbolism that comes with Lamar’s endorsement. “Kendrick has been very big on supporting the Latino community,” says the designer. “All the comments from the Latino community [on Instagram] were really proud. It’s more than a hat, it’s representation.”
Boosting established luxury houses
Lamar isn’t only connected to independent brands. For the rapper’s much talked about Glastonbury headline slot in 2022 — which featured intricate dance performances and visual art — the artist wore Louis Vuitton, along with a custom-made crown of thorns by Tiffany that took 10 months to make and incorporated 8,000 pavé diamonds. Lamar performed on the runway at Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer 2023 menswear show wearing the crown.
LVMH scion Alexandre Arnault, then the executive VP of product and communication at Tiffany, praised the connection in a statement, declaring that “Kendrick Lamar represents the artistry, risk-taking creativity and relentless innovation that has also defined Tiffany for nearly two centuries.” Lamar also scored a film for Chanel’s couture collection last January. Directed by his long-time collaborator Dave Free, it starred Naomi Campbell and Margaret Qualley and garnered $2.8 million in MIV for Chanel the week following its release, according to Launchmetrics.
The Super Bowl has the potential to be another fashion triumph for Lamar, and whichever brand he works with is sure to see results. He follows other performers who have made outfits into talking points: from Beyoncé, with her Black Panthers tribute in DSquared2 in 2016, to Rihanna’s Loewe pregnancy-reveal corset in 2023. This is Lamar’s second time performing; he appeared with other rap icons Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg in 2022, when he wore a Louis Vuitton suit designed by — and in honour of — the late Virgil Abloh.
Harris thinks this year could mark another shift. “Maybe it’s the dawn of a new Kendrick style era, some one-of-one shit that is never going to see the light of day [again],” he says. “As a showman, he has to go extra hard on the biggest stage in the world.”
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