During the protracted Ciccone-Ritchie custody battle a strange thing revealed itself: Rocco Ritchie was a style icon. Now, when we say “style icon”, we don’t mean in the classic sense like, say, Steve McQueen or David Bowie. No, we mean it in a slightly left-of-centre kind of way. At the time of The Troubles, Ritchie Jr would appear in various paparazzi shots beaming in a full-on rainbow spectrum of skater clothes looking somewhere between “good” and “so bad it’s good”.
There he was in a white hoodie under a two-tone lime/grey fleece from The North Face, in aubergine-coloured skater trousers with a lilac Palace fleece or dressed in wide-legged cut-off jeans with a black Palace top zipped up to his chin. In fact, the athleisure label Palace, loved by hipsters and celebrities is a big part of Rocco’s look.
Palace, like Alexander Wang, love a good riff on pop culture, so it seems appropriate that Rocco would begin his modelling career by fronting the campaign for Wang’s nine-piece capsule collection collaboration with Adidas. Here, the Wang-ian touch is the Adidas crescent turned upside down. The image above of a non-beaming Rocco (eyes closed, sun on his face) wearing the insignia on a black tracksuit and clutching a bin bag (very now) feels on point with his adolescently awkward brand.
