This year, fashion and music have been circling each other like estranged relatives at a family function—eager to embrace, but unsure of the choreography. Jaden collapses the distance entirely. His appointment as Christian Louboutin Men’s Creative Director lands almost simultaneously with the release of RED CLOAKS, his new single with Rich The Kid, and the overlap doesn’t feel accidental. The shoe and the song are mirrors: red soles, red cloaks, both symbols of power, secrecy, and spectacle.

The track, heavy and insistent, is the first entry from his forthcoming project 2025: A Surrealist Ball or Elephants Reflecting Swans, releasing on September 26th. It follows last year’s 2024: A Case Study of the Long Term Effects of Young Love, a project that leaned inward, toward tenderness and self-inquiry. 2025 gestures outward. It courts drama. It understands fashion’s theatrical grammar — the mask that never slips, the nocturne staged at Ferrières — and translates it into sound.

Jaden is not the first artist to juggle roles, but what distinguishes him is the way he treats these mediums as continuous. The release of RED CLOAKS doesn’t just “bridge” his hip-hop roots with his new fashion role; it erases the idea that they were ever separate to begin with. To him, a track and a collection are built from the same raw material: silhouette, rhythm, repetition, excess. Hip-hop taught him to build worlds, and fashion gives him the architecture to house them.

The red cloak here is not a costume change. It’s a signal of permanence — a refusal to live inside the disposable logic of “eras.” Instead, Jaden positions himself as a cultural director of his own making, slipping between runway and recording booth without breaking stride. He doesn’t just wear the cloak or design the shoe; he insists they are parts of the same body.