With reporting by Gaby Wilson

The line between music and fashion has always been a blurry one, especially in hip-hop, and no one understands that quite like A$AP Ferg. While most know Ferg for his music and ties with the A$AP Mob, his roots run deep in fashion and design. Monday night (Dec. 7) he launched his collab with Fancy, making a concerted effort to get his designs to his fans as easily as possible.

"It's a dope, cool new way to sell clothes to the fans and the kids that love my music, and just my fashion," he told MTV News at the launch event. "Fancy is very well-respected in the fashion industry, and I just thought it would be dope to do a collab with them. We're going to release a Trap Lord rug, and a bunch of my Trap Lord merch through the Fancy website."

The merch Ferg speaks of ranges from T-shirts and hats to exclusive pieces that won't be available through the Trap Lord site. And if you needed any more reason to trust his taste, know that fashion is in his blood. Growing up in Harlem, he'd help his dad with his clothing boutique, screen printing shirts for people like Diddy and Loon.

"I was never a stranger to work because I worked early on," he shared. "Especially when [my dad] got his kidney failure, he couldn't do a lot of the physical things. I had to be his hands and his feet. He taught me the craft and I just took it on."

Ferg later went on to art school where he majored in fashion and minored in fine arts. While you might think of him as a rapper first, he actually has a firm foundation in design. But working in the fashion and art worlds have never been cheap, often requiring a lot of expense up front, so he shifted his focus to music.

"With rapping, I didn't have to buy any canvases that was crazy expensive. I didn't have to buy leather that was crazy expensive," he said. "Rapping, it just came straight from my head. I just got a bomb beat and rapped on it. So it was the least expensive way of doing art. I ran with that, it got me to where I'm at now. Now I can put out my other talents."

And he's not holding any of those talents back either. In addition to teaming up with Fancy, Ferg has a collab in the works with A Gold E jeans and hopes to end up designing everything from robes to cutlery in the future. But don't worry, he's still focusing on music, dropping his new album Always Strive And Prosper in early January. His single with Future "New Levels" with Future is said to drop soon, and believe it when Ferg says it, he is on a "new level."

Below, A$AP Ferg also opens up to MTV about his background in fashion and design, and shares some details on his upcoming sophomore album Always Strive And Prosper.