What happens when the bigges name in pop culture meets the biggest name in sneakers? Secrecy, rumors and an inevitable drop-day massacre. It’s finally time to meet to the Air Yeezy.

Kanye West: Conceptually, it was made for a person that was walking on another planet. So it’s like almost a shoe-like space boot.

Mark Smith: There was never a design brief or a color brief; it was very fluid. He had some really great ideas coming into it with neutral browns and tans and keeping it a very monotone color and then letting the interior have a little bit more pop to it.

Kanye West: I wanted to give the Yeezys their own colorway. You wouldn’t have a whole fuchsia wall in your house, but you might have a little Jeff Koons piece of art that’s fuchsia and small. So I do it small, on the inside of the tongue.

Mark Smith: Throughout the process we probably did a couple hundred color studies, and I think we only showed him a couple; it was more like he was giving us his insights into color and then we’d play with it. Like, “What if this black was a suede,” or “What if this black was patent leather?”

Kanye West: I got like 12 different colors at my house, just colorway samples we were trying. I’ve worn them at certain events—the all-black ones I wore at the Grammys.

Mark Smith: I think we really started hitting our stride when we had real samples to look at.

Kanye West: It expresses my sensibility of design: what I want to do with clothing, with hotels eventually. The type of colors that I live in.

Mark Smith: We agreed that any time we wanted to add something to the product, we had to take something else away so that it wasn’t just adding, adding, adding—it was just one of those things where it can get down to as little as possible but make it as functional and comfortable and cool as possible.

Kanye West: We had a lot of conversations like, “We wanna just put it on eBay,” and I’m like, “No! People need to be able to get this shoe!” At first they were only gonna do 3,000 pairs. Now they’re doing 9,000, which is still limited. It’s not like it’s 200,000.

Mark Smith: We’re real happy with the result.

Kanye West: Oh my god, they’re gonna be out of there! Toot! [Laughs.] They’re not even gonna hit the ground. The boxes from the truck will literally not hit the ground.

Home // SNEAKERS // FEATURES // Air Yeezy