Evolve The Culture: A$AP Rocky’s New Metal Chapter at Ray-Ban Featuring Nas
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By PAGE Editor
One year into his tenure as Ray-Ban’s first-ever Creative Director, A$AP Rocky is no longer experimenting with legacy—he’s reshaping it. With the debut of the New Metal Collection, the Harlem-born polymath delivers his first optical designs for the heritage eyewear house, expanding the brand’s vocabulary through a lens that is equal parts archival reverence and future-facing precision.
For Rocky, this isn’t about revisiting icons. It’s about re-authoring them.
The New Metal Collection leans into Ray-Ban’s deep design codes—wire frames, rimless constructions, oval silhouettes—while interrogating their cultural elasticity. Rocky understands what few creative directors fully grasp: heritage is not static. It is tension. It lives between what was and what could be.
The silhouettes echo decades past but resist nostalgia as a crutch. Bold metal optical frames like the 0RX3927V and 0RX3931V channel a sharp, corner-dreams attitude—sleek ovals and studied proportions that feel lifted from a ’90s rap cypher yet sharpened for today’s image economy. Narrow rectangular sun frames, including the 0RB3927, introduce an angular severity, while oval counterparts such as the 0RB3931 temper that energy with fluid curves.
Where the collection becomes most radical is in its embrace of minimalism. Rimless optical styles—the 0RX3929V and 0RX3928V—strip the frame down to its architectural essence. The result is less about adornment and more about presence. Ultra-thick lenses on sun styles like the 0RB3929 and 0RB3928 subtly disrupt expectations, bending vintage cues into something subversively modern.
Then there is the outlier: the 0RB3930 001/Y7. An unapologetically futuristic wraparound available exclusively in select stores, the silhouette sculpts a deep curve in gold wire, anchored by a low-slung double bridge and high-visibility mirror lenses. It is less accessory, more artifact—a collector’s proposition positioned at the intersection of performance and mythmaking.
To unveil the collection, Rocky joins forces with Queens rap luminary Nas in a cinematic campaign set inside a late-night New York diner. A memorable scene from the Hype Williams’ film, Belly, was reenacted. The visual narrative stages a dialogue between generations—’90s iconography refracted through Rocky’s hyper-modern aesthetic. The choice of Nas is deliberate. It is lineage, not cameo. It is the acknowledgment that cultural evolution is most powerful when it honors its architects.
Rocky’s first year at Ray-Ban has been defined by intention. Rather than dilute the brand’s identity, he has sharpened it—reasserting metal as both material and metaphor. In an era dominated by maximalism and algorithm-driven trends, the New Metal Collection proposes something more enduring: clarity.
Evolve the culture, the campaign urges. But evolution here is not spectacle. It is precision. It is knowing which lines to preserve and which to redraw.
With this release, A$AP Rocky doesn’t just extend Ray-Ban’s legacy—he positions himself firmly within it, crafting frames designed not only to be worn, but to be remembered.
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Featured
One year into his role as Creative Director at Ray-Ban, A$AP Rocky debuts his New Metal Collection—an evolution of the brand’s heritage silhouettes that blends ’90s nostalgia, radical minimalism, and future-facing design into a bold cultural statement.