A surefire way to piss off Doechii is to call her a rapper from Miami. “People just assume that if I’m from Florida and I make music, then I must be from Miami. Hello? I’m from Tampa — that’s on the other side of the state. I didn’t grow up on trendy beaches, I grew up in the swamps. I’m a swamp princess.” The 26-year-old singer has many alter egos, but “The Swamp Princess” is her main one. Jaylah Jymia Hickmon started stepping into fictional roles back in school (“I guess that’s the theater club’s influence”), where she also began writing poetry and matching beats to her lyrics. That’s when she came up with the stage name Doechii. Among her other youthful passions were gymnastics and dance. “I love competition. I get that from my mom — she was a dancer all her life and had a real fighter’s spirit. She raised me on her own, went through a lot, and never complained,” Doechii recalled. “Winning dance and sports competitions was cool, but only music can give me an orgasm.”
Doechii rose to fame as a singer a couple of years ago when her tracks Yucky Blucky Fruitcake and What It Is went viral on TikTok. She recalls that time with some ambivalence: “I got a lot of fans, but they expected me to keep making stuff that sounded similar — poppy and fun. So I had to disappoint them.” At first, Doechii drew comparisons to Destiny’s Child, later to Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj. But she moved from lyrical pop to R&B tracks with “heavy lyrics” — like Stressed, which is about, well, the “wild stress” she’s lived with since she was 13. Eventually, she decided to move away from serious topics and pivoted toward rap and hip-hop — she wanted to make tracks perfect for dancing, working out, and “doing wild shit.” Her love for experimentation has earned praise from Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé, who both call her one of the most intriguing new-generation artists. She’s a total chameleon — not just musically.
These days, Doechii gets invited to fashion shows, is tipped for a major fashion contract (though that seems unlikely — she loves change too much to tie herself to one brand or aesthetic), and appears in glossy magazines. Even Anna Wintour posed with her at the Council of Fashion Designers of America gala, and Vogue published a fashion diary of her Grammy prep. Hard to believe that just two years ago, Doechii was more likely to land on a “worst dressed” list: some of her more infamous fashion fails include a neon-red lace flower-print dress at a Beverly Hills gala and a skin-tight faux-denim-print jumpsuit at a music festival in Palm Springs. Let’s hope her stylist, Sam Wolfe, wasn’t responsible for those looks — in 2023, he was already working with her, but not close enough yet to pull her out of what she herself called her “trashy Dsquared2 era.” Doechii openly admitted her weakness for ugly hats and dramatic trains, dubbing her aesthetic #trashycore. Luckily, by 2024, Sam and Doechii had clicked — and agreed it was time for a change.
“In the summer [of 2024], she started recording new tracks and said she wanted to refresh her wardrobe to reflect the fact that the old era was over — she’d grown up,” the stylist recalled. “When I heard the album, I suggested going in a preppy and tailored direction. Like, play the office siren.” Before that, Doechii’s style briefs were more like, “something between Tina Turner and a weirdo rapper” (that’s what she told Sam Wolfe before the Billboard Women in Music awards). The result was a red-and-pink knit Caroline Reznik dress with a deep neckline and lace-up back. Now, Doechii wants to look like she’s running for president, meeting the in-laws, and applying to the Ivy League — all in one day. “Still, I don’t want to dress too strictly — there should always be a sense of me under the shirts and blazers: someone who loves freedom, fun, and chaos.” Her current style inspiration is early-career Jay-Z, back when he wore suits, smoked cigars, and, in her words, looked like “a gangster with taste.” Will she stick with that look for long? Probably not. There’s a reason she calls herself a tragic actress — she lives for reinvention.
Now that the “trashy Dsquared2 era” is behind her, Sam Wolfe considers Doechii his dream client. Mostly because comfort ranks dead last for her: “I adapt to any look. I even like when clothes are complicated, unwearable, like stage costumes. Beauty first, then freedom of movement.” Doechii’s self-irony is also on point. When commenters on her @doechii posts started saying things like “she looks like a man” or “is this a drag queen?”, she responded by doing a Paper magazine shoot as a buff guy with an eight-pack, gave him a whole backstory (“His name’s Ricardo, he’s from Panama, and like me, he’s bisexual”), and even made a few public appearances wearing fake mustaches. “I think it turned out great. I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Damn, I’d sleep with him.’” When critics tried to shame her for using face tapes, she went live (“Yeah, so what?”) and asked her makeup artist Di Carrion to make sure the lifting stickers were extra visible during her Grammy performance. “I’m not the type to be embarrassed. Women already have it hard enough without worrying about dumb stuff like comments on their appearance,” she told Paper, explaining why she refuses to conform to public expectations.