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Music

This Week in Music and Fashion: Cam'ron, Missy Elliott, Grillz Made From Rap Lyrics and More

You can now buy an Ebola mask designed by Cam'ron and a grill made from hip-hop lyrics.

Long gone are the days of band logo tees. Since the launches of Kanye's DONDA clothing line and Drake's OVO store, artists have been getting more clever with their branded offerings. That was all the more apparent this week as Cam'ron announced he'd be selling Ebola masks and Jhene Aiko teamed up with on a capsule collection; as was the fact that the evolving relationship between music and fashion is becoming increasingly more artful. Here are the highlights from the week in music and fashion.

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Cam’ron Is Now in the Ebola Mask-Selling Business Harlem style icon/pink fur pioneer/runway model Cam’ron has added another venture to his fashion resume: Ebola masks. He’s cashing in on the rampantly spreading panic across the US by selling his own design—and, to be honest, if I have to live in a world where we fearfully walk around in masks, there is no other mask I’d want to wear. Cam decked out your standard hospital mask with a photo print of the signature outfit he wore to fashion week back in 2002 and posed in it on Instagram, where he wrote “Ebola is no joking matter.. So if u have to be safe.. Be fashionable. #CamEbolaMask.” If you’re in the market for one, you can pre-order yours from Cam’s site for $19.99.

Someone Made Solid Gold Grillz Using Hip-Hop Lyrics It’s one thing to wear the same grill as your favorite rapper; it’s another to wear one inspired by their lyrics, and thanks to Roopa Vasudevan that is now possible. At last month’s Dumbo Arts Festival, the artist unveiled her projcect “grillz,” where she 3D-printed gold mouthpieces based on algorithms derived from rap songs. She came up with grills made from the lyrics of Fat Joe and Lil Wayne’s “Make It Rain,” Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy,” and Puff Daddy’s “Been Around the World.” Why those songs? Roopa zoned in on lyrics that that had references to the polar sides of wealthy and poverty (the projects, drug dealing, prostitution, and cars, cash, jewelry). She then, in her words, took those “mentions in each category [and] scored [them] according to relative distance from words of the opposite polarity, and the resulting landscape formed is extruded into a 3D shape and printed as wearable grills.”

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Someone Is Embroidering Biggie and Tupac Lyrics Onto Lingerie On the other end of the wearable rap lyrics spectrum, artist Zoë Buckman has been trying to reconcile feminism with hip-hop in the form of an art installation where vintage lingerie comes hand-embroidered with the lyrics of Biggie Smalls and Tupac. Buckman gave an interview to i-D about the project, saying, “As a feminist, my approach is not to shun them or their music and say, ‘That’s bad, I never want to listen to this.’ My approach is to take their words and recreate them as something beautiful and thought-provoking.” Check it out here.

Missy Elliott Soundtracks Alexander Wang’s H&M Launch

If there’s an American-based foil to Saint Laurent’s Hedi Slimane, it’s

Alexander Wang

, who’s the US kingpin of music in fashion. The designer—who recently sat

Kim Gordon

,

Rihanna

,

Nicki Minaj

,

Tyga

,

Miguel

, and

Die Antwoord

all next to each other at his spring 2015 show—carried over his love of music to the launch for his H&M collaboration. Just like his sense of style, Wang has good taste when it comes to music—and, to further flex that, he tapped

Missy Elliott

to play his party. Her setlist read like a best of, with her peforming “Get Ur Freak on,” “Lose Control,” and “Work It Again”—which she nodded to earlier in the evening with a

“You Can’t Workout With Us” snapback

. Let me know if you see one of those for sale.

Marissa G. Muller does this every week. She's on Twitter - @marissagmuller.