And the Winner Is…

Hi Vikki! Tell us how Ice Cold came to be. I’ve been writing about hip-hop since the early 1990s. Along with music, I’ve always known that all the sartorial choices from sneakers to jewelry to the way the music expressed itself visually were such a big part of it. Jewelry was this great subculture within the culture. It said so much and it changed as the music changed, and I thought, it’s time to tell that story.

You arranged the book by decade. What inspired you to structure it this way? I kept coming back to chronological order, starting with the 1980s, and where artists lived. In the 1990s, hip-hop started to step into its power. Labels formed, and the jewelry reflected that. You can see it changing. Early on it’s primarily gold and smaller chains, earrings and nugget rings. Then you start to see the bigger chunky ropes, medallions, then later diamonds and platinum come into the scene. Now the sky is the limit with Pharrell Williams’ colored gemstones, and artists are thinking about sustainability, [considering] where the diamonds are found and who makes them.

You write that, on the street, “style speaks to the power of possibility.” Tell us a bit more about that. Especially in a culture like hip-hop, style was more than conspicuous consumption. It was a communication tool, your identity, a way to telegraph to the world who you were. It means so much to step out on the street, in the club, and show yourself. It signaled making it, notions of power, transcending your circumstances. I think that’s really powerful given what the music had to start with. And as the music evolved, so did all this wealth. Fast forward to someone like Jay-Z who doesn’t wear a lot of jewelry anymore. He wears great watches. It’s not as flashy; it’s more about generational wealth.

As a longtime music journalist, what was it like to go deep into another subject—jewelry—as you explored the convergence of jewelry and hip-hop scenes? Not only was jewelry a very male-dominated world, but hip-hop was too, so it was something I was used to. Much of these worlds are run by immigrants or children of immigrants—New York’s diamond district and also Canal Street. These are immigrant start-ups, hustler cultures. I was interested in the similarities between that and hip-hop. How did those worlds intersect?

Erykah Badu and Missy Elliott are pictured in the book with some incredible pieces. Missy and Erykah are two of my favorite collectors. What Erykah does with her grills is just incredible. And the moving parts on Missy’s turntable ring. They’re super inspiring. Women have come a long way on making decisions career-wise and where they’re spending money. But there’s judgement too. Cardi B. was showing off watches in a YouTube video and people asked if she even had a house yet, questioning a young woman of color. There are so many layers to this book.

What part of making this book was especially fun or memorable for you? I really enjoyed seeing how much this newer generation of artists—Tyler, the Creator, ASAP Rocky, Lil Yachty—is aware of jewelry history, and how they’re so inspired by people like Pharrell Williams. It was really interesting to delve into what they knew of pieces that came before them and their take on what’s happening now. You see this continuum manifest in this current generation. Hip-hop is about remixing; it gets reinvented again and again.

What’s on your coffee table right now? Mitchell S. Jackson’s Fly: A Big Book of Basketball Fashion, a style history of basketball culture. Also Pharrell’s new book, Pharrell: Carbon, Pressure & Time: A Book of Jewels. It’s only his jewelry and it’s great.