Mouth Full of Golds: The Forgotten Story of Eddie Plein The inventor of the grillz who refused to update himself to the digital world

There are objects that have entered the collective imagination in such a profound way, that seem to have always been there. For hip hop lovers, grillz is one of them. No one knows exactly the origin of golden dentures, almost as if they had always existed. The question of their origin seemed to have an obvious answer even for Lyle Lindgren, an English video maker and photographer passionate about hip hop, until he met Eddie Plein, a Jeweler from New York and inventor of the grillz as we know it today. Their meeting gave life to Mouth Full of Golds, a book that tells the parable of Plein, from a Surinamese migrant in New York in the 70s, to a trusted jeweler of many of the rap stars who marked the hip hop of the 90s.

The last chapter of the book is called Haute Denture, and you say that A$AP Rocky marked the rise of grillz in this era. Why him ?

What he has done is taking the grillz, an aesthetic very masculine and aggressive, and giving it a softer edge, we can say feminine, more considered by design.  What Rocky did, as an artist, is bringing all this iconography from hip hop, tackling it with high fashion, smashing together, and creating this aesthetic that has never done before.  He wears the bottom grillz, which screams hip hop, but he also wears runway Raf Simons and some crazy Margiela. He is one of the first people to say: «These are my influences, this is how we do».  We know some rappers that get super-rich very quickly but they are not accepted in high fashion, as Rocky is. I think Pharrel has done as well, but Rocky took it on a different level.