What Vic Mensa Can’t Live Without

September 1 will be five years since I stopped drinking. As a lover of alcohol, I like to have my nonalcoholic spirits so I can feel involved, you know what I mean? The Guinness drink honestly tastes like beer. It’s a fun way to go out and have lunch with friends on a summer day and be in conversation and feel like you’re drinking, but you’re still exercising discipline. I’ve tried a variety of NA everything. I got nonalcoholic tequila, I got nonalcoholic whiskey. I’ve tried many nonalcoholic beers, and I just rock with this one.

I just made a custom pair of Adidas Sambas as a creative exploration while I’m finalizing the visual, aesthetic world of my next album. I made them in collaboration with my homie atShoe Surgeon. Shoe Surgeon is the leading custom-sneaker expert pretty much in the world. He’s a friend of mine, I’ve known him a long time, and he was kind enough to let me come through and put a creeper sole on these Sambas, in the style of the Adidas creepers that my friend Billy Walsh made with his brand Mr. Completely back in 2015. They ultimately didn’t release it, but I had the original prototype versions. I lost one at Paris Fashion Week a couple years ago and I was so salty, but I was able to go and re-create it with Dominic at Shoe Surgeon. I went over there and hand-painted it and had some fun.

Beyond the homage to Billy Walsh and Mr. Completely, I grew up playing soccer, so I always wore Sambas. That was my original shoe. Before I had swag, I was just a soccer-playing kid. I would wear dirty soccer jerseys and Sambas to school. That was my daily outfit.

I’ve been using this Sony FX30 camera religiously. This camera’s been getting me across the finish line. I’ve been shooting all of theOrange Treevideosusing this. In just getting hands-on and learning my way around it, I’ve been able to advance my knowledge of filmmaking so much. This is my first time really diving into the craft after almost 20 years of making music videos. But this is the first time I’ve really taken this part of the art into my own hands. I’m able to just get a beautiful image and just capture life. It’s taught me an entirely new practice within my discipline as an artist. I’m actually about to get theSony FX5, which just came out. That’s what I really want. But this is what I got for now, my Old Faithful.

I’ve been using it since last April or May, so just a little over a year. In the beginning, everything I was doing was super wack. I didn’t understand exposure and light and shadows. But I taught myself on the internet and had good friends that I could call on. And eventually, after enough time making shit I hated, I landed on some shit that I loved.

Cymbiotika is fresh. They have a lot of very useful supplements, especially in a workout capacity. I’m a gym junkie. I be in the gym every day at 5 a.m., but I stopped drinking caffeine because it was dysregulating my nervous system. Shilajit is a substance that they get from some rocks in the Himalayan mountains. It gives you natural power and strength and energy. It tastes so fucking bad, though. It’s so weird. It’s like a thick, dark, molasses consistency with this funky smell. Usually you have to mix it with hot water, but Cymbiotika has a supplement version that’s mixed with chocolate that tastes a little better. Cymbiotika makes it palatable.

I always got Tums in my bag because I love spicy food and I can’t fucking handle it. I love Jamaican food and African food, and then my stomach hurts. I’ll take them before I eat, because I already know what’s about to happen. But I recently became a vegetarian, most of the time vegan, so I don’t need the Tums as much. It’s more rare that I need the Tums, but still more than a regular person. But I still got them on me just in case.

Crowned Skin is a young Black skin-care company from Chicago, I believe. This lotion is a brilliant creation. It almost eliminates the need for cologne. It’s scented but it smells like cologne, and it serves both purposes. The founder sent me the whole line, and it was a rare case of very useful gifting, because I use it every day.

Lately, I’ve been using the Monarch scent. It smells so good, like cognac, like rich mahogany. It kinda smells like Jamaica, Ghana — Afro-Caribbean is what it smells like to me.

Tom Ford Noir, whew. Smells like money. It smells like Black James Bond.Suaveis a good description. I get a lot of compliments when I go out wearing Tom Ford Noir. That’s for my film festival, my Cannes, my Paris Fashion Week moments. Whereas the Crowned Skin is my daily. If I’m going somewhere and I’m wearing Jean Paul Gaultier, I’ll probably put on Tom Ford Noir.

Labay Market is an exotic-fruit market in Flatbush. The owner is this OG from Grenada. They import fresh fruit from the island daily, and they ship it around the country. I was introduced to them by an amazing creator namedNicolas Nuvan. He’s a New York–based journalist who’s telling beautiful stories of culture through food and putting the proper respect and value on food cultures of the global South within New York City’s melting pot. He took me to Labay Market.

Fruit is probably half my diet. So when they told me they could overnight-ship me fresh mangoes from Grenada, I’m like,Fuck, I’m sold.They kill the ones from the grocery store. No comparison.

This is a shirt I designed with my team. My manager at Unlike Creative actually came up with the idea. I’d been looking for a way to make a product out of myOrange Treeseries, and this felt like a cheeky little way to encapsulate the conceptual framework of it. I made fruit stickers that say things like “End Police Violence,” the kind of shit I’m into. I found a way to make it playful and fun, but also deep and meaningful. And it’s a great way to piss off a racist, so I’m always about that.