In her new single “Echelon (It’s My Way),” Angel Haze name-drops Helmut Lang along with a few other of her favorite designers, a kind of declaration of the arrival of her triumphant personal style: “Fashion Week I’m out here slaying / Dressed in all the latest.”
“Fashion came with success,” Haze says, now standing in the label’s Meatpacking District showroom. “But I’ve always known what I like—the colors and textures.” To gear up for her debut album Dirty Gold and the performances that will come along with it, Haze has linked up with Helmut Lang designers Michael and Nicole Colovos, who are taking her through the showroom and ask the ultimate Helmut Lang question: “Do you wear layers?”
“I love to wear, like, five layers,” Haze replies, pulling a black-netted shirt off the rack. “This is dope. It needs to be really breathable with all the fast talking I do.” She has a tendency toward ensembles in all-white or all-black, but then, there’s the question of a bright pink dress, an anomaly among the gray-scale clothes hanging around the perimeter of the room. “Do you wear dresses?”
A pause. “I only wear dresses when I don’t want people to recognize me.” A black dress with elongated armholes goes on. “It’s sexy, but tough,” Nicole says. “A little goth-ninja,” Haze agrees. After comparing tattoos and talking about a mutual love of “slouching around in leather,” Haze is hooked. “I’m, like, gushing over you guys!” she says, laughing.
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Haze was signed last year, and her debut album, Dirty Gold, is due out early 2014. In the meantime, she’s releasing a series of covers and freestyle tracks on SoundCloud, collectively titled 30 Gold. She’s tackled contemporaries’ hits like Jay-Z’s “Tom Ford” and Drake’s “Worst Behavior,” plus Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” and, most notably, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love,” her rework of which delves into her own moving personal narrative, weaving in thought-provoking lines from poet Andrea Gibson. Haze’s emotional honesty cut with intelligent ferocity is what makes fans love her. Because I had to switch the narrative it now makes more sense for the Tweet to come in after she looks at the racks (it was in the midst): Just before she finishes looking at the collection in the showroom, her phone buzzes. “Someone just asked me to go to their homecoming dance on Twitter,” she says.
Onstage, it’s like Haze is ten feet tall in neon socks and Givenchy boots, her flow has such a tough energy. Fashionwise, she gravitates toward clothes she can move in. Correction: “Something I can jump around in! I jump on the speakers!”
Finding clothing that makes performance fluid is the priority: “I gain more of my fans from live performances,” Haze says. “Everything I build my tracks on—they see it come out live.” But before Haze goes on her own tour next year, Vogue has an exclusive first listen of her newest 30 Gold cover of One Republic’s “Counting Stars.” Will a love of style, unstoppable flow, and strong singing voice make her a star? Count on it.
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