Forgive Duffy, the 24-year-old breakout singer from Wales, if she seems like a bit of a naif. She doesn’t use a stylist, she told us at Condé Nast’s Fashion Rocks concert — she wears her mother’s hand-me-downs. (“Always a good pair of tight jeans — that’s what she taught me. She used to sit in the bath for hours trying to make them fit.”) And she’s still learning about the music world: “Well, I’m just getting into kind of the American hip-hop scene,” she said, “and I had the luxury of speaking to…” Here she forgot who it was who did a version of one of her songs; her rep couldn’t remember, either. Then it came to her: “The Game! So the Game covered my song ‘Mercy,’ he kind of did a version with Cool and Dre, and they put a rap on it. I’m not going to lie to you and say I knew who the Game was, [and] I may not have owned one of his records, [but] at that point I got to speak to him on the phone and I bought one of his records. So I’m slowly kind of understanding American black music, which I think is amazing.”
