Playboi Carti is late to his shoot at an apartment complex on 139th Street in Harlem. Here, the 21-year-old rapper has a gang of publicists waiting for him, while a crew of Grailed employees organizes piles of clothes for him to try on. Carti loves the site Grailed, which is like a virtual candy store for those with a taste for Raf Simons and Balmain. “I’ve always been a thrift store kid,” he later tells me. But these clothes are far from humble thrift store finds: A stylist has draped a $20,000 fur coat and a bevy of other haute goods over the couch. Eventually, he arrives, making a much-awaited entrance in a new pair of sneakers. Who can be angry at him? He’s a lanky, handsome heartthrob, who wears his skinny jeans with serious swagger. “I don’t like baggy clothes,” he says. “I’m a skinny dude, so I think [skinny jeans] look better on me.”

Carti first came onto the scene in 2015 with his song “Broke Boi,” a catchy hit that spoke about a tricked-out Jesus piece and poked fun at squares “in the mall buying ice.” It earned the attention of rappers like A$AP Rocky. Just a few days ago, he dropped his self-titled mixtape, which features singles like “Wokeuplikethis*” and “Magnolia,” and got as high as number four on the iTunes album charts. Carti’s fashion résumé is also impressive: He was in the Yeezy Season 5 show, performed this past season at VFiles with rapper Lil Uzi Vert, and made a cameo in one of Drake’s OVO lookbooks. During New York Fashion Week: Men’s, he headed over to Raf Simons’s first New York show with A$AP Rocky. “That felt like the first time [at a fashion show]. That one was the real deal; it felt amazing,” he says. “I met Raf, and I got the butterflies.”