Time Traveling: Vintage Shopping with Rapper Misfit Dior

Photographed by Jeremy Allen

» SEE THE SLIDESHOW «

Here is what Laeticia Harrison-Roberts, aka Misfit Dior, is wearing for an afternoon of shopping at the Manhattan Vintage clothing show: an exquisite black-and-red-plaid swing coat and matching small-waisted sheath, a combo halfway between Betty Grable and Bettie Page; a narrow fake snake belt from Primark; Zara pumps; a red Givenchy purse, and a tiny hat perched on her undulating blonde Tippi Hedren–esque coiffure. It’s all period-perfect, until you notice that her slender arms are half-covered with expressionist tats, as if Marc Chagall had devoted himself to inky buxom viragos.
 
“My mom sewed this outfit in two days, she bought the fabric for a pound a yard at a market in East London! I usually wear pink, but she couldn’t find any pink on such short notice,” laughs Harrison-Roberts, whose mother makes virtually all her clothes from sketches her 29-year-old daughter, a rapper with fashion aspirations (more on this in a moment) provides. But there are things that mum, skilled seamstress that she is, just can’t whip up—vintage furs say, or structured handbags, or the funny little hats Harrison-Roberts loves. We are in search of all three, and whatever else catches her eyes, hidden today behind red Dior shades with purple stems.
 
At the very first booth, just inside the door, a strand of chubby pearls captures her imagination; less than a minute later, a framed handbag shaped like a little suitcase finds favor. “It’s almost like a laptop carrier, it’s the right size,” Harrison-Roberts observes, though in fact that invention is more than a half-century in the future.
 
But of course, it’s the ability to time travel, at least when it comes to clothes, that makes clothing shows like this so compelling. (The next edition is January 17 and 18.) While other shoppers are melting over beaded flapper frocks and Victorian lingerie, Dior is in love with mid-century fashion modernism, trying on a succession of big-shouldered furs, pancake flat chapeau, and gently caressing exquisitely wrought garments like a navy New Look dress with lacy insets. “I love the buttons!” Harrison-Roberts sighs. “They made things so beautifully back then.”
 
When she spied a full-on fox coat from the eighties which actually sports a Dior label she nearly swoons, but the price—$3,500—is not what an up-and-coming recording artist has in mind, regardless of her love of all things Dior. (On this subject she is quite knowledgeable, discoursing on one of her idols, the perennially leopard-clad Dior muse Mitzah Bricard.) So it is with great excitement that she uncovers another, shorter fox coat, perhaps showing a few signs of a long happy life and with a far less impressive provenance, but nevertheless chic and supremely wearable for $240.
 
This sublime purchase is rapidly stuffed into a shopping bag, and we repair for a coffee so she can fill me in on her extraordinary story. Harrison-Roberts grew up in the English countryside, in Sussex, but by fifteen was hanging out in London clubs til all hours. “My parents would pick me up at four in the morning,” she says with a smile.
 
As soon as she could, Harrison-Roberts moved to London, where she worked as a model and was an admitted hard partier. She loved rap and, in that way that young girls have, managed to talk her way backstage when Eminen was in town (maybe her chainmail top, pasties, and baggie jeans helped her case.) She quickly became friendly with his entourage, forming an especially close bond with Proof, who would take on the role of hip-hop Higgins to her rapping Eliza Doolittle. “He would critique all my rhymes, he mentored me,” she remembers.
 
On New Year’s Eve 2003, Harrison-Roberts arrived in the U.S., where she found an apartment in Williamsburg (where else?), worked the door at various clubs, attended open mics in Harlem, appeared on VH1’s Ego Trip’s (White) Rapper Show—“I left after two episodes; it was patronizing for me, but I got a lot of exposure”—and not accidently, watched a lot of Hitchcock movies, perfecting her personal style.
 
Though she is currently completing her first album—the premiere track of which is entitled, tellingly, “Hitchcock Blonde,” she confesses, “I love fashion! Fashion actually came before music for me.” Visions of boxy purses and tiny hats and full-skirted frocks dancing in her head, she lowers her glance, gives the slightest toss to her pale waves, and admits,  “I want to get one album out and then—I really, really want my own clothing line!”