The Style of Sound: The Paradox of Kanye West, Otherwise Known as Yeezy

Ostentatious rapper Kanye West has built a billion-dollar legacy from a clothing line with perplexing aesthetics, revealing a dichotomy behind everyone’s favorite walking controversy.

From the stage to the runway, The Style of Sound is a series that explores the intricate relationships forged between your favorite artists and their iconic fashion statements.  

Written and illustrated by Micaela Garza

Rapper Kanye West, also known as “Ye,” ''Yeezus,” and in a past life, “The Louis Vuitton Don,” is an undoubtedly eccentric personality in 21st century pop culture. As infamous as he is for his enormous persona, he is also known as one of the most fashion-forward rappers of all time. He has often appeared in the audiences of Fashion Week Runway shows in Paris, Milan, and New York alongside his celebrity stylist turned famous-for-being-famous wife, Kim Kardashian. West is apparently so fashionable that the dying retailer Gap teamed up with him on his infamous Yeezy line, signing a 10-year contract with the rapper (after underhandedly failing to pay Black designer Telfar Clemens for the Gap x Telfar collaboration that never saw the light of day).

Despite West’s luxury collaborations, lavish lifestyle, and outlandish Twitter tirades, his fashion brand Yeezy has remained conspicuously minimalistic since its 2015 inception. But at the same time, Yeezy’s primitive aesthetics have created a far-reaching wave of futuristic minimalism in the fashion and streetwear industries. He’s been a longtime frenemy of Virgil Abloh, who founded the luxury streetwear brand Off-White, another brand known for a simple yet abstract design, and all it takes is a quick Google search to round up a list of fast-fashion retailers currently selling Yeezy knockoffs. West’s billion-dollar status doesn’t come from his rap career, but from Yeezy sales, and it seems that with this new collaboration, Ye might be on his way to actually becoming “the Steve Jobs of Gap.”

Kanye channeling his inner Steve Jobs courtesy of The Oxford Guild

Before the sketchy Yeezy x Gap collaboration was announced, West had already made deals with luxury label Louis Vuitton, collaborated with street-style brand Bape, and switched his iconic label from Nike to Adidas. Aside from his fashion endeavors, one of the rapper’s most important partnerships is his marriage with the most influential pop culture star of the 2010s: Kim Kardashian. 

An early episode of the hit show Keeping Up With the Kardashians featured West and his stylist cleaning out Kim’s closet and giving her a makeover, something the reality star seemed to  embrace. Once known for sporting Juicy Couture tracksuits and clutching a shiny Louis Vuitton alongside BFF Paris Hilton, Kim now dons nude-colored latex bodysuits and sometimes camouflage brown-green dresses reminiscent of ancient loin cloths at the behest of her husband. In her recent SKIMS line, we’ve seen Kim move beyond the girly, shiny, style of her former DASH boutique, opting for simpler, monochromatic looks instead. Years of paparazzi photos document her progression, substantiating assumptions as to what pulled her style in this direction — it was undoubtedly the Kanye West influence.

Though the pair is now a multi-billion dollar power couple, West was broke in 2016, claiming he was “$53 million in debt” and begging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to invest in his “ideas.” A few months later, Kim Kardashian tweeted that she was cashing in her “80 million (dollar) video game check & transferring 53 million into (their) joint account,” leading to speculation that the KKW Beauty founder had bailed her husband out of debt. In the viral “73 Questions with Vogue” video that she filmed in her Yeezy-esque mansion, Kim proudly proclaimed that she had given her husband “really good financial advice on saving.” According to Business Insider, Yeezy was valued at nearly $3 billion in 2019, and with Kanye as sole owner, the former broke rapper became a streetwear powerhouse. But how did Ye go from bankrupt to billions in just three years?

Jonah Hill in his Yeezys courtesy of Getty Images

Rapping isn’t West’s only talent: his knack for hype and controversy is arguably his most valuable asset. His fans have fallen victim to the hype of an album that was never released and supported him through a short-lived presidential candidacy in 2020, but the ultimate hype of Kanye’s career came with the release of Yeezy footwear — sneakers that were dubbed “an extension of Kanye’s closet” and thus, a physical symbol of his ‘hype.’

From an aesthetic angle, the shoes are fairly simple: a knit base attached to the trademark Adidas Boost material on the outsole. The original shoes came in neutral, camouflage type colors with some designs even looking like unfinished factory samples with defective patterns and random codes on the sides. Compared to the bright, elegantly designed Kanye West x Bape Bapesta “College Dropout” footwear collaboration, or the early Air Yeezy sneakers released with Nike, most Adidas Yeezys lack a fun color scheme or intricate design, which one might expect from someone with such a huge personality. However, it is this exact contrast that characterizes Yeezys: the sheer focus on simplicity is what sets them apart. 

Aesthetics did not create the hype around his famed label; rather, the small-batch releases combined with Kanye’s cult following fueled Yeezy’s hype. Many fans’ love for the shoe came after the hype had already settled. And when the fashion label released the shoes on a wider scale in 2018, they still sold out like collectors’ items because of the hype surrounding them.

Photo courtesy of Roe Ethridge

As of late, Kanye has tinkered with some oddly futuristic designs that, in some outrageous sense, keep up with the minimalism of his past style. Yeezys are quite literally a walking paradox. Combining imaginative composition with schematic simplicity seems to be the main idea driving his take on fashion. In 2020, he dropped the all-white Yeezy Foam RNNR “Ararat” Sneaker, which looks like an alien attempt at creating wearable Swiss cheese. And just a month later, he teased the “D Rose” all-white slip-ons, which seem to draw on the character Dry Bones from the Super Mario franchise for inspiration. Combined with the fact that a Yeezy x Gap collaboration has already been signed into the future of fashion, these designs lead to many seemingly unanswerable questions. Is this futuristic play on minimalism the new direction of Gap? Will the cult fanatics of Yeezy follow their enigmatic leader into the Gap stores of yesteryear and actually buy his designs? Is there a possibility that Kanye West could design the space suits for the participants in Elon Musk’s pursuit to colonize Mars? Only time will tell.

With a brand that simply sells shoes (amongst other forgotten articles of clothing), Kanye has managed to rack up billions of dollars in revenue, climb out of debt, and crawl into the realm of streetwear as a major designer. The simplistic, sometimes avant-garde aesthetics of Yeezy contrast the extravagance of the man himself and reveal a dichotomy within the essence of Kanye that would probably make his hero Steve Jobs proud. Perhaps this minimalistic futurism is what makes the mind of the greatest, so damn great.