Stefflon Don has a taste for the finer things in life. Or, more precisely, the finer things that eluded her earlier in life. Since dropping hits like “Senseless” and genre-bending collabs with French Montana and Jeremih she’s claimed a spot as one of the UK rap scene’s premier exports.
That’s her with iced-out wrists on the cover of her new mixtape, paying homage to Lil Kim’s The Notorious K.I.M. and embodying fierceness. The project is titled SECURE, which reads as more of a reason for contentment than a flex. But when the 26-year-old singer-rapper born Stephanie Victoria Allen discusses her upbringing in Rotterdam and East London as part of a working-class immigrant Jamaican family of seven, it becomes clear that the title not only speaks to her confidence but also her newfound financial well-being. For someone like Allen, financial security can feel like a luxury.
A few days after dropping SECURE, Stefflon spoke to Pitchfork about how she spent her first big check, balling out in Topshop, and what she considers really making it in the music business.
When it comes to money, I always thought that you have to go and get it [yourself]. To make money, I used to decorate cakes for a little bit, but I was more so a hairdresser. I started doing hair because I always wanted my sister to do my hair and she’d never make time for me. She would tell me, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.” So I just taught myself how to do my own hair. Then my friends were like, “Oh, can you do my hair?” It went from being “my hair” to “my friend’s hair” to people seeing my friends on the road and asking me to do their hair, too.
My family didn’t have it easy. It was very much a roller coaster when it came to finances in the household—one minute we’re all right and the next minute we’re not. I remember going into certain places as a young girl, like Topshop for example, and I would see a chain for £14 [about $18]. I remember looking at my pockets thinking, “If I buy this chain, I literally cannot buy anything else.”
When I started rapping, paying for studio time was difficult. I used to pay £25 [about $32] an hour when I first started—a couple [studio sessions] I got for free, but they weren’t the greatest. I would write a lot of stuff at home, so by the time I get there, I could just do four songs in an hour or something. I was always saving money for studio time. I got my own studio now, so I just pay rent.
The first big paycheck I made was probably from a publishing deal. The first thing I did was move my family out the hood. It wasn’t, “Here’s the money!” It was, “Here’s the house. Let’s go.” Everyone was excited, because the house that we lived in [before] was in a real bad environment.
When I take that £900 and go into Topshop these days, I’m coming out with like 20 bags. I remember when I could barely buy two things. I tell myself, “This time you gotta flex, but you gotta make way more money before you start flexing all the time.”
I see a lot of people with a lot of jewelry and a lot of cars. I don’t want to be anything like that. I’m not downing them or anything—more power to them—but I feel like if you play with all this stuff and you don’t own a house, that’s really not the right way to be doing it.
At the end of the day, making it is not just making it: It’s about making it and staying here. You’ve hit this height, but as long as you live you’ve got to keep going. It never really ends.