Assessing Lil Uzi Vert's personal style is a perpetual challenge. The uncategorizable musician, who uses they/them pronouns, wears a lot of expensive stuff, sometimes well and sometimes not so much.
Take this outfit that Lil Uzi wore to a New York Fashion Week party on September 9.
Uzi was somehow wearing a lot and little at the same time, both layered in extremely heavy Rick Owens leather with sneakers to match and practically exposed, given that they wore no shirt and their Balenciaga boxers were almost fully revealed by the sagged pants.
In the grand scheme of Lil Uzi Vert outfits, this is probably one of the most successful ones. The proportions are exaggerated with clear intent and the monochrome layers aren't fighting each other for attention.
Despite the fact that it was a miserably humid 80 degrees or so at night, the heavyweight look is impressively at ease. It's not easy to make shirt-over-bare-chest work but the textures and silhouette that Uzi plays with here all work.
To return to the earlier point, though, discussing Lil Uzi's style is demanding because Lil Uzi almost never wears even remotely similar outfits.
It's also demanding because every appreciably goofy Lil Uzi look must be weighed against the unshakeable fact that Lil Uzi reportedly plead "no contest" to felony assault charges filed by ex-girlfriend Brittany Byrd in 2022.
So, to assess Lil Uzi Vert's approach to getting dressed is to balance these frustrating, contrasting elements as if they're atop a scale. What outweighs what?
Being that Lil Uzi is still getting invited to big events by big brands and their style remains as fascinating, strange, disagreeable, and confrontational as the musician themselves, there's still some merit in working through it on a material level.
It's not a tacit co-signing of Lil Uzi as a person as much as it is an exploration of a difficult artist's incalculable public persona, for better or worse.
