“As I got older, I decided I’m going to make fashion,” explained Diddy, AKA Sean Combs, to the bemused crowd at the launch party for his new mixtape, MMM, before releasing the cover: a shot of himself with Kate Moss from 1999.
Part of a series shot by Annie Leibovitz, this portrait first appeared in US Vogue in October 1999 in a feature called Puff Takes Paris, in which Puff did indeed take Paris, alongside Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Oscar de la Renta, Alek Wek and John Galliano.
Combs, who studied fashion, now runs the imaginatively named fashion line Combs, but he was also one of the first hip-hop artists to appear on the front row at fashion week. He was also the first black artist to appear in a Vogue US editorial at a time when hip-hop was only beginning to move from subculture to a mainstream fashion reference point.
Diddy describes MMM as a “sonic motion picture”. We call it a “self-mythologising ode to his wealth, success and empire”, but, to be fair, he is Forbes’s richest man in hip-hop.
