When you think of fashion designers, you may think of places like New York and London. But there are many designers here in the DMV, with just as much talent. Derronte “Rocket” Scott is one of them. He has over 200,000 followers on Tik Tok, including celebrities now trying to get their hands on his unique pieces. Check out our discussion on YouTube.
Q&A with Derronte “Rocket” Scott
ANNA-LYSA: How did you get the nickname Rocket?
DERRONTE: The name Rocket came from high school actually. My last year of high school, back in 2012, I graduated and I went to this school for the first time and nobody really knew my name and that’s when I really started.
I had this rocket logo that I dd for my uniform shirts, cause my school had to wear uniform, and we could have logos on our shirts. So, I had a rocket logo that I had ironed on, on all of my uniform shirts and around the school everybody kept asking me about the shirts. I gave some of my friends some, so after I gave some of my friends some…the whole school was just on it. They were just like ‘where do you get the shirts from?’ and they were just like ‘the rocket boy, the rocket boy’ and I just ran with the name Rocket.
Where do you see yourself going with this next? Now that you’re seeing all this popularity.
I actually have been rebranding, me and my brother. We’ve been rebranding the RZN brand, so right now I’m just doing the custom work. So, when I do drop this new line…we’re going to see what happens from there. That’s our main focus….with the legal parts, I can’t really go big with it.
What has that been like to see how your work has taken off on social media?
It has been amazing man. The crazy thing about it was I kind of blew up on Tik Tok. Tik Tok was just like my video dump, where I was just dumping and making my videos for instagram and on Tik Tok, my videos ended up going super viral, getting five million views, four million views and ever since then, my instagram started taking off.
What was it like to hear from Dapper Dan?
My dad was sending messages to Dapper Dan. My dad knows how much I love Dapper Dan, I didn’t even know. A week ago, he sent me a screenshot, ‘Dapper Dan said he loves your work’ and I was like ‘dang, thats’s crazy,’ I was super excited.
What message do you have for young people in the DMV?
We have our lane here.
D.C. likes to pick up a lot of fashion from everyone else and we kind of drop our own culture…don’t give up on the DMV culture. Keep doing what you’re doing.
With RZN Design Group, we’re looking forward to bringing out the designers in the DMV…who no one knows. Being that we have a lot of eyes on us right now.
