km ijKanye West has fought long & hard to earn the respect that he now has in fashion, & yet still he must keep pressing forward to reach a higher status within that world. Nevertheless, Yeezus still does it big. He landed the cover story of the latest issue of NY Times Style Magazine. Being that he’s recently launched his Yeezy brand with Adidas & looks to continue furthering from that, he had plenty of content to cover in his article.
The write-up was mainly focused around Yeezy’s plans with building in fashion, his Adidas line, his “new attitude” (which isn’t so heavily based around him being a “god”), his family, & more.
Kanye is very adamant in solidifying his position in fashion just as he did in music–by innovating, although the two worlds are very different:
West’s overall ambition is to be to fashion what he is to music: a mainstream innovator, a translator of tomorrow’s ideas for today. “Before the Internet, music was really expensive. People would use a rack of CDs to show class, to show they had made it,” West said at one point. “Right now, people use clothes to telegraph that. I want to destroy that. The very thing that supposedly made me special — the jacket that no one could get, the direct communications with the designers — I want to give that to the world.” Needless to say, there are plenty of differences between the path to success in either field. These days, a good song can travel a near-frictionless journey from creation to consumption. It’s harder to get from the fringes to the center in fashion; a designer needs money, infrastructure and channels of distribution for his or her work to get seen. Plus, it’s a world where exclusivity has cachet. When West says he wants everyone to have access to high-end style, there are plenty who find the idea the very antithesis of luxury.
The article also touched on how ego-less Kanye has become, which he himself credits to his lovely wife Kim Kardashian & daughter, North West. The new Ye is very evident in the music he’s presented to the masses lately:
West’s newly mellowed self is also beginning to come through in his music. Following the raw scrape of industrial noise-rap that was the “Yeezus” album, there was “Only One,” a tender number sung from the perspective of his late mother, Donda (who died unexpectedly in 2007) and recorded with Paul McCartney. Then came “FourFiveSeconds,” a stripped-down folk song with Rihanna and McCartney.
“I have this table in my new house,” West said, offering a parable. “They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table, and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked.
“I realized that table was my ego. No matter what you put around it, under it, no matter who photographed it, the douchebaggery would always come through.”
Check out the photos taken from the cover story below & read the full article from NY Times Style Magazine here & check out a bit of the behind the scenes footage below.
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