Reflecting on his recent breakup with Gap, Ye (f.k.a. Kanye West) admitted Monday at his YZY (f.k.a. as Yeezy) season nine show in Paris that he is unmanageable.
Dressed in a T-shirt that said “White Lives Matter,” the multi-hyphenate celebrity addressed his audience of 50 for about six minutes to explain why the show’s start time was delayed. (The presentation finally got rolling about an hour and a half after its scheduled 5:45 p.m. start time.) “We are the culture and we will not be bullied or treated differently than you treat any other fashion show that might start a little bit later just to present the best idea to you,” he said towards the end of his speech. “These pictures will last forever. This is something that you will not be able unGoogle.”
In a characteristically rambling talk, he discussed the brand’s prior shows, his career evolution and why he recently opted to cut ties with Gap Inc. eight years before their contract for Gap Yeezy by Balenciaga was going to expire, essentially confirming Mickey Drexler’s belief that the collab “doesn’t make any sense.”
“When we went to Gap the colorways wouldn’t come back. A pant would be missing. A store in Atlanta wouldn’t open and it felt like we were just there to be slowed down. But there’s no slowing us down now,” he sermonized. “We have nothing to lose and only everything to gain and I don’t want any of y’all to talk to me about pain.”
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Moments later he added: “Fashion has had a tendency to be extremely classist to say that if you weren’t pretty enough or didn’t have enough money, or weren’t born into money, or weren’t scamming, that you can’t afford this cut. When I was at the Gap, Demna [Gvasalia, creative director of Balenciaga] made a cut of a T-shirt. The Gap took the exact colorway and made the cut that they felt was at the bottom of the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs chart,” he continued, referring to a human’s basic physiological needs for food and clothing.
With that reference, he repeated almost word for word the analogy he made in an interview with Vogue Business earlier in the week. (“They made the T-shirts we had done cost $200. And then, they took our color palette and made a shape that was appropriate to what I think someone in the office thought was at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” he told Luke Leitch.)
“The people in the boardroom felt like they knew what the people in the streets wanted. And this is what we fought for,” he continued.
Regarding his work with corporate entities, he concluded, “You can’t manage me. This is an unmanageable situation.”
When the YZY clothes, which were designed by Ye and Shayne Oliver this season, finally were shown they were all, in the former’s words, “pull on and pull over” and completely free of hardware. Earth tones and baggy silhouettes prevailed and key pieces included puffer coats and hooded ponchos.