Image via Getty/Brad Barket for Fast Company
Kanye West has never shied away from interviews, but few discussions have managed to go behind the scenes of Yeezy design. After a revealing feature in Forbes over the summer, West is following it up with an even deeper dive into his brand.
Joined by accomplished footwear designer and current design director of Yeezy Steven Smith, West appeared at the 2019 Fast Company Innovation Festival where the two discussed how their working relationship came to be, the way Yeezy approaches product like Apple, and what the future holds for the brand's sneakers.
Scroll through for the biggest takeaways from West and Smith's Fast Company interview below.
Smith Says West Changed His Life
Before joining the Yeezy team in 2016, Smith—who's perhaps best known for his work on numerous New Balance sneakers and the Reebok InstaPump Fury—held the title of Innovation Director at outdoor brand Keen. Dissatisfied with his role, he left in April of 2016 without any concrete plans. “I was working for another company. I was head of innovation, and it wasn’t innovative. And I walked away one day. People were like, ‘You just left your job?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, it just wasn’t it.’ … And then one night, the phone rang, and it was ‘Ye, and it started from there. I looked at it as a blessing, I was in kind of a dark place, and his hand reached out and pulled me to the light, pulled me from the depths to the top. And it’s been an amazing experience ever since."
The Yeezy Boost 700 Was Based on Scrapped Sketches
Their first design together, the Yeezy Boost 700, originated after looking through Smith's old sketches that had been rejected by other brands. He and West went through bins of old designs before Kanye found a draft of a sole with circular cutouts that would later become one of the 700's signature features. “I remember you said to me, ‘Did they ever make this?,’ I’m like, ‘No,’ He goes, ‘What the hell is wrong with them? All this stuff is amazing. Let’s make all this stuff you wanted to make that they were too stupid to make.”
Kanye Thinks Balenciaga Is One of His Biggest Competitors
After touching on the topic during his two-hour-plus interview with Zane Lowe last month, West again discussed his friendly competition with Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia. Kanye specifically cited a paparazzi photo which showed him wearing an early prototype of the Yeezy Boost 700 in January 2017, weeks before Balenciaga's Triple S first appeared at the brand's Paris Fashion Week Fall/Winter '17 showing. "Often, me and Demna have a similar spirit, and it's who's gonna get to the idea and bring it to the world, beforehand? ... Then there's stuff one-to-one at the last Balenciaga show, where I can show you one-to-one stuff in our office, and I'm like, 'Who's got cameras in our office?,'" West said.
On How Yeezy Approaches Product Like Apple
"We don't put a timeline on things, but the idea of competition that's out there helps present a timeline for people and it makes things be better and forces us to as creatives to bring things to market, because Yeezy is the Apple of apparel," West said. "There hasn't been an Apple of apparel. There hasn't been that thing. It's like you want, you wanna think... You see like a friend come in with a cool Uniqlo jacket and you all be like, 'Wow, this is like the Apple of apparel' Then you go to Uniqlo, and it's like these weird dresses all over the place and it's just like, this is not the way I pictured it."
Kanye Thinks Retail Is Moving in the Right Direction
Although retail continues to struggle, Kanye has an optimistic outlook, specifically citing Allbirds' view on expanding its brick and mortar reach. "I’m really happy about what the founder of Allbirds said about retail and the experience," West said. "Or like, me and my wife went to Dover Street [Market] last time we were in New York, and we went to Jacob the Jeweler. It was just such a beautiful experience to be able to go back into these physical spaces. This world is so D2C [director-to-consumer] and online. It’s just therapeutic just to see how someone else laid out the clothes."
Kanye Works Without Boundaries
"The thing I love about Kanye is the rules are gone," Smith said. "Everything you’ve ever done has been smashed to pieces and we think about it completely different. It’s liberating creativity like I’ve never experienced before. When I worked at Nike or one of the other big corporations, you’re a cog behind a desk and it’s preprogrammed with oh, we’ll go have a focus group. We’ll get a brief. We’ll pitch it to management. 10 people will decide what we’re going to do from there. And then you’ll do four more sketches. And then 10 other people will decide on that, and then we’ll show it around and get people’s feel for it. With Ye, it’s just like, “Go!,” and we’ll create. You can’t really describe it until you’re in it."
But He Does Have a Few Rules
Despite more or less giving designers the freedom to do as they see fit, Smith and Kanye admit there are a few constraints on the things they're currently working on including eliminating stitching and shoelaces, the latter of which West says was born out of convenience. "That’s our new constraint. I’ll be at Sunday Service having to tie my shoes seven times in the middle of service ... It’s 'Yeezy make life easy.' We gotta put all the work in so you guys don’t have to put the work in," he said.
Kanye Wants to Do Much More Than Make Colorways
"I think there was a breakthrough in what we did with the 350s and the 700s, but still there’s things when we’re looking at color palettes, it’s kind of been more of an opinion on something than it was a complete innovation," West said. "We moved the [Yeezy] headquarters to Cody, Wyoming. We have a 4,000-acre ranch and a couple other properties out there. We’re going to be farming and going seed-to-sow and have our own cotton hydroponic farm and our own hemp farm and our own wheat farm so we can see every element."
They're Already Making Product in America
While there's been much debate over the practicality of West's wishes to move Yeezy production to America, he and Smith remained enthusiastic about the idea and even had something tangible to present—algae-based version of the Croc-like shoe that's said to be known as the Yeezy Foam Runner. Produced with EVA and foam made out of algae harvested from ponds, Smith says the shoes were produced in Atlanta just a day prior.
Kanye and Adidas Haven't Always Seen Eye to Eye
As he's touched on in previous interviews, Kanye was close to signing a $30 million deal with Louis Vuitton to back his apparel line following the Yeezy Season 1 show in 2015. The deal never went through despite West's verbal agreement with LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault and put a strain on his relationship with the Three Stripes.
"The first Adidas collection came out and there were lineups around the store," West said. "Then second collection we did, no lineups, no store, no backer. I told Adidas, ‘Hey, I’m going to marry Gisele (Louis Vuitton)' ... I came back [to Adidas and said], ‘Hey, Gisele dumped me, would you still wanna...?"
The struggle to find funding for the apparel line caused West to put up his own money, which was around the same time news surfaced of his reported debt and he publicly reached out to Mark Zuckerberg for financial help.
These days, it sounds like the tables have turned. "The power is when I talk to my lawyer and Adidas is treating me mean and I have seven points of termination," West said. "I put on my trenchcoat and said, ‘We’re moving these factories to America. And that’s how it’s going to be.’ Our relationship is beautiful now.”
