YEEZY, 2019—2022
The logic of fashion has always been about anticipation, about sensing the future before it fully arrives.
At Yeezy, Ye blends samples that don’t typically mix: emotional want and utilitarian need. As ambitious as the man behind the vision, the brand wanted to become a cultural operating system, and its canvas of investigation began at the infrastructural level. Yeezy reoriented everyday essentials — shelter, clothing, mobility — as aspirational, selling the world on a reality where necessity itself became the object of desire.
Sometime in the 2020s, Ye had stretched a new canvas for wealth: family, land, and children — a shift from the traditional rap lexicon of guns, b*tches, and cars.
To me, no products represented these ideas more starkly than one’s bank account and mode of transport.
Ye had just been canceled by JPMorgan Chase, expressing frustration over centralized banking. So I sampled a gun magazine for a bitcoin wallet.
Prototype by Pasha Bulaev
Around the same time, Ye was showing how small we were all living by driving around the suburbs of Chicago or pulling up to McDonald’s in his ATV. So I sampled a shoe for a car tire.
Mobility, durability, ownership, and preparedness had long been latent themes in the brand’s trajectory. This was fashion as logistics, design as contingency planning.
When we presented the tire internally, we included a USB complete with everything the Yeezy team would need to bootstrap manufacturing a tire, including a CAM appendix, a breakdown of the entire process, as well as machine tool paths to CNC all sections of the tire mold.
