The Kanye West Style Decade

Taking a look back at ten years of influence.

When The College Dropout dropped ten years ago, it was not immediately obvious, even to the most astute music fans and critics, that hip-hop was about to face an overwhelming upheaval in the coming decade. What was even less obvious was the overall influence that Kanye West would to unleash upon numerous aspects of culture, including men's style and fashion.

Kanye's career launched when 50 Cent was the reigning champ of hip-hop, and the larger-than-life Queens native was challenging everyone to step up their gangster ways. Mob-type choppa suits and bulletproof vests were par for the course, and all of a sudden the man who would come to be known as the Louis Vuitton Don pops up rocking all-Polo everything just like everyone else who was living life instead of portraying a character. To look back ten years later is to see all the various aesthetics and cultures that Kanye tapped into as he began shifting popular culture himself.

Just like his sound, Ye's style has evolved beyond anything anyone could have imagined when The College Dropout first popped into your CD player. "Don't talk about style cause I'll embarrass you," Kanye once warned. Undeterred, the Complex Style team threw caution to the winds and sat down with Complex TV for a retrospective survey of the looks that Kanye's passed through over the past decade. The video is designed to take you back to the day when you tried to rock something you'd laugh at now—and to get you wondering about what's next. 

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