Ms. Azalea is a peroxide-blond Australian rapper of 23 who mysteriously popped up front row at New York and Paris Fashion Weeks (notably at the Chloé show last fall, where she was demure in culottes and a buttoned-up blouse), attended the Vanity Fair Oscars party and seems to have captivated Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.The magazines both pronounced her a top-10 style star to watch this year, alongside Lupita Nyong’o and Suki Waterhouse. All this before her debut album, “The New Classic,” is even out (it is scheduled for release April 22).
Like Rita Ora and Lil’ Kim before her (yes, the cycle of an It Girl has considerably compressed), Ms. Azalea is offering a fresh, incongruous face and an out-of-nowhere story to an industry whose appetite for novelty seems bottomless.
The Australian designer Dion Lee, who has gotten to know the rapper the last couple of years, said, “It’s quite a strange thing for an Australian to try an American version of hip-hop.” But, Ms. Azalea said, “It’s always interested me to do something in a field where there aren’t a lot of females.”
