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“I’m Kanye West,” says the rapper-provocateur. “The word ambitious is beneath my abilities.” As West leans into a rebooted life of fashion design and gospel music, Christina Binkley explores his new cast of characters, his thwarted dreams, his acknowledged stumbles and his bigger-than-ever plans

Last July as he was working at home, Kanye West conceived of an idea that struck him as genius: the perfect hoodie. Slightly cropped at the waist, heavy as a winter coat, it would be like comfort food, biblical in its ability to soothe but futuristic in its reach. In a color like flax or dusty stone—a palette Jesus might have worn—it would be made for the masses, sold for $60 or so, folded and stacked on tables like loaves of bread.
West, who is 42, and his Yeezy label team hoped to sell this garment somewhere like Costco, which he admires for its broad reach and its democratic piles of merchandise. “I like Costco as an idea. I like Walmart, too,” West says.

As he considered this, the rapper-producer-evangelist–fashion designer was also at work on a round-robin of projects for which he had assembled teams of engineers, architects, designers and artists at his minimalist stone-and-glass Axel Vervoordt–designed home in Hidden Hills, California, and a nearby workshop. Many of the projects aspire to solve the world’s ills. He was erecting—without obtaining building permits—prototype low-income dome-shaped housing on the grassy hills of nearby property that he owns. He was exploring a concept for carless cities. A mood board in the office for his city-development projects was labeled GOD and MAN.
West, who mentioned in passing that he was preparing to record a new album in Mexico this spring, has 21 Grammys, including four for best rap album. He has been called an “American Mozart” by Atlantic writer David Samuels.

But West aims to be a great designer of all kinds of things. For more than a decade he has pursued plans to have the phenomenal impact in fashion that he’s had in music. West admires Steve Jobs. And McDonald’s. And the Gap, where he worked as a teen, when it was cool in the 1990s. “I believe that Yeezy is the McDonald’s and the Apple of apparel,” West says. “In order to make the Apple of apparel the next Gap, it has to be a new invention. To invent something that’s so good that you don’t even get credit for it because it’s the norm.”

After a three-year absence from fashion runways, West began to toy this January with the one endeavor at which he had flagrantly failed: showing a well-received collection in Paris. Given the magnitude of his many self-funded projects, there was little doubt he could pull together resources to stage another fashion show. The question was, why bother?
When I mentioned one evening this February, as we walked across his office, that he is obviously ambitious, West halted midstride. “I do not like the word ambitious. I’m Kanye West. The word ambitious is beneath my abilities,” he said. “I’m just a doer.” He added, “You can see in my eyes there’s not one bit of fear.”

Early in 2019, West began staging “Sunday Services,” roving weekly gospel services with a professional choir of 120 singers who perform in monk-like robes, gold pendants and Yeezy sneakers. The services, which are on hold due to the coronavirus but may return in a virtual form inspired by balcony singers during Italy’s quarantine, are based around gospel songs—“Revelations 19:1,” and adaptations such as a rendition of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” set to the lyrics “Jesus is King! Jesus is love!” They are funded by West and have gathered a following of fervent loyalists. Celebrities, such as Justin and Hailey Bieber, often stop by. Sometimes West sings or talks. At a service I attended near the Burbank airport in January, West rapped a bit and said Jesus had helped him leave his ego behind.

West also has ideas about criminal-justice reform, a topic that has galvanized his wife, Kim Kardashian West, into studying law in an apprenticeship program. He is eager to hire released prisoners to work in apparel manufacturing and he says he has discussed building factories in the U.S. with Adidas, which makes his Yeezy sneakers. (An Adidas representative declined to confirm those discussions.) It isn’t clear that any of it will come to fruition, or where, or how.

West assumes he will find support in government. He does enjoy unusual access to the Trump administration. In mid-July, West chartered a plane to Sweden, planning to jet in and free the musical artist A$AP Rocky, who had been detained on assault charges earlier that month. Warned that the Swedes wouldn’t welcome the gesture, he canceled the plane and—from his swimming pool in Calabasas—called Jared Kushner at the White House. Donald Trump called less than an hour later, after West had climbed out of the pool and was eating breakfast. That same day, the President tweeted, “Just spoke to @KanyeWest about his friend A$AP Rocky’s incarceration. I will be calling the very talented Prime Minister of Sweden to see what we can do about helping A$AP Rocky.”

West continued to focus on perfecting the hoodie through the summer. He invited Laurence Chandler, designer of the label Rochambeau, to visit and float ideas after connecting through a mutual colleague. Chandler was overawed to meet West, who he felt had jump-started his career by wearing an oversize $210 Rochambeau T-shirt in multiple colors in the August 2014 issue of GQ.
They began to order samples of the hoodie from Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel. Charney, who was ousted from his position as chief executive in late 2014 amid allegations of sexual harassment and financial misconduct, which he repeatedly denies, had in 2016 established Los Angeles Apparel, which churns out T-shirts and hoodies for clients, sells direct-to-consumer, and makes the Sunday Services uniforms.

Charney became a regular at Sunday Services (in a March phone call, West said everyone deserves forgiveness). Chandler began acting as Yeezy’s general manager, though he wouldn’t officially assume the title for almost another six months. Chandler flew between Calabasas and his office in New York City, working with all the resources West could buy—contracting pattern makers, sewers and other specialists. West hired a chemist to work with a color designer to create the perfect earthy, ancient colors in a lab. While many startup labels work with one or two part-time pattern makers, West hired nearly a dozen. All these people worked elbow to elbow in West’s office space with the architects and engineers—one of them the sculptor Meg Webster, who was consulting with West on his house and city-design projects.

“There was a flow of ambition in that place that felt like it could lead to something big,” Chandler said. When a New York manufacturing executive asked, “How big do you think this could be?” Chandler says West replied, “$50 billion. Scratch that. $100 billion.”
In the fall, West halted work on standard Yeezy merchandise and directed his in-house design director, Tessa Matthias, a former senior designer at Theory, to redirect her energies to more experimental designs. When I mentioned that the decision was surely costly, he replied, “Money is a man-made construct.”

When West was just starting to release his own music in 2002, he reportedly told another musician, “I’m gonna be the best-dressed rapper.” In 2005, he announced he would debut a clothing line, called Pastelle, which never launched. By 2009, West had moved to Italy with his friend Virgil Abloh to work as a fashion intern for Fendi, where his proposal for men’s leather jogging pants was rejected.
This did not stop him from putting a version of leather joggers on a Paris runway—his own—in 2011, in a rushed debut of an eponymous womenswear collection that generated snickers from the front row. A fur backpack, shimmery sweatshirts, shearling heels, zippers galore—the collection was a mishmash of influences and was never produced for retail. My review for The Wall Street Journal compared a beaded look to the Flintstones. Asked to comment on the collection by the New York Times, Anna Wintour replied, “Ask someone else.”
“I got ripped,” West says now of the reviews he received, pursing his lips. “You had to go to school to be a designer. That was the climate back then,” he says.

After retreating from Paris in 2012, West built partnerships with Nike and later Adidas under the Yeezy label. He staged Yeezy fashion shows during New York Fashion Week in 2015, 2016 and 2017, one of them involving a disorganized debacle on Roosevelt Island, and another combined with his release of the Life of Pablo album at Madison Square Garden. The clothes he showed in those seasons amounted to versions of yoga and comfort wear, some of it torn and rugged, in earth- or skin-tone hues. The most noteworthy thing about them were the dusty colors—and the Yeezy shoes.
West argues that success in music shouldn’t preclude success in another profession. “I got to live out every version of ego—rapper, I had my own version of Jordans, I’m married to Kim Kardashian West,” West told me one evening, emphasizing each syllable of his wife’s name. West, in fact, had helped establish Kardashian as a Vogue-endorsed fashion plate, tossing out her pre-Kanye wardrobe, reducing her to tears.
Now West wanted to reinvent the codes of fashion, he said, to shift the way the whole world looks.

West was hospitalized in 2016 for what he calls a nervous breakdown. “I’ve been through Deadpool. You know that movie?” West asks, referring to a film whose superhero protagonist gains mutant abilities after being tortured. At one point, he mentions kintsugi, the Japanese pottery whose broken pieces are restored with gold seams. “I had an actual mental breakdown from attempting to put together all of the pieces.”

Then came the fan outrage over his embrace of Donald Trump. West, who told me he is not registered to vote and doesn’t follow politics, announced in 2016 that if he had voted, he would have voted for Trump. He began wearing red MAGA hats and tweeted about his love for the president, noting they “are both dragon energy.”
West doesn’t disavow any of that, but he told me he resents that people make assumptions because he is black or a rapper or a college dropout. After he repeatedly returned to this topic over several weeks, I realized that West is driven by it. This is why he has been pouring himself into design projects, and getting bruised by them. “I’m a black guy with a red MAGA hat, can you imagine? ...It reminded me of how I felt as a black guy before I was famous, when I would walk in a restaurant and people would look at you like you were going to steal something. ‘This is your place, Ye, don’t talk about apparel. This is your place, Ye, you’re black, so you’re a Democrat.’ ”

Having money and celebrity hadn’t protected him. “Everything is about putting people in their place. Classism, protectionism—not just racism,” he said one evening. “Classism is like living on a bookshelf. The more money you have, the higher you go. And you get to the top and look over and what do you see? Fear.”
He was rocked by another shock after his Deadpool year, in 2018 when Abloh was hired as artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear, a job to which West had aspired. “That included one of my best friends being crowned king. Virgil. Louis Vuitton. We grew up on Louis Vuitton–Marc Jacobs duffels,” West says. “My best friend.”
West says he had had a shot at designing his own LVMH label when the French company offered to back Yeezy apparel after his first season showing in New York. But the deal was never inked, and LVMH pulled out without comment. “That was pretty devastating,” West says. He notes that LVMH later launched the Fenty label with Rihanna: another musical artist getting a deal that he had badly wanted.

Possibly the most lucrative business decision West ever made was to retain ownership of the Yeezy brand. Today he produces sneakers and slides in a partnership with Adidas. The Yeezy merch, the apparel and nonathletic footwear—the products that he has been working so diligently to develop this past year—are West’s alone. During an appearance on James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke” segment last October, West told the talk show host, “Yeezy is worth $3 billion.” An Adidas representative declined to confirm West’s estimate, citing a confidentiality agreement. West, who says it bothers him that people don’t think of him as a successful businessman, repeated the estimate to me in February when he explained how he could afford to support so many endeavors. “The fact that Yeezy does $1.5 billion in revenue per year and the valuation is $2.9 billion means that money does not have to enter into the equation.” I later reviewed documents that reflected those numbers.

West hasn’t gotten much credit for it from fashion critics, but he has had an impact on what people wear. He has not dramatically changed silhouettes in the way that Thom Browne shrank the suit or Balenciaga designer Demna Gvasalia blew it up. It has been more of a drip, drip, drip and finally here we are, wearing oozy-soled Yeezy Boost 350s and layers of ochre yoga wear. And those fur bags, shearling-covered footwear and slouchy leather pants that appeared on his early Paris runways? They became trends, too.
The RealReal, a luxury consignment website, reported the Yeezy brand was its most-searched streetwear and sneakers brand in the first half of 2019. West’s aesthetics are now also circulating via Skims, his wife’s lingerie and loungewear line. While he has no official role, Kardashian West told me last year that West functions as her creative director and weighed in on Skims’ logo and packaging.

West and his wife and their four young children live in Hidden Hills, a grassy, gated enclave adjacent to Calabasas, a 13-square-mile town that straddles the urban-rural divide of Los Angeles County. The beige Erewhon supermarket near West’s office, which is across the street from his music studio, is a popular gathering spot for Lululemon -clad yoga enthusiasts who visit its Tonic & Juice Bar for reishi mushroom cappuccinos and coconut Bulgarian-rose water. Calabasas is overwhelmingly white. According to the U.S. Census Bureau in July 2019, 0.8 percent of its population was black.

Last fall, West opted for a change of scenery after a stay at the Amangani resort in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He purchased a 4,000-acre sheep ranch near Cody, Wyoming, and then a second working ranch nearby. In Wyoming, West saw the potential to establish a headquarters for Yeezy and to pursue his projects in a less restrictive environment than California—a place to eventually employ former prisoners in apparel factories, and to test housing concepts for which he’d received pushback from Los Angeles County officials, who made him tear down his prototypes. By November, he was chartering a Monday-morning flight from Van Nuys to bring his pattern makers and design team to Cody, putting them up for the week in motels and then flying them back to Los Angeles on Fridays.

West wanted to incorporate raw materials from his ranch, such as wool from his 700 sheep, into the clothing. He became fascinated by the native sagebrush, which he often mistakenly called sage. He brought his father, Ray West, a man of many professions including photojournalist, to Cody. They drove around in lunar-looking vehicles such as one of West’s fleet of Sherps, Russian all-terrain, water-ready vehicles. When his father learned how many acres the ranch contained, he replied, “A black man?” West recounted the moment at the end of his “Follow God” music video.

One of the reasons that West discontinued selling merch was that he wanted to stage a biblical opera called Nebuchadnezzar at the Hollywood Bowl in November. “You don’t do merch for an opera,” he told Chandler. He brought his chorus to Cody’s high school to rehearse. In L.A., though, the performance seemed unfinished an hour before curtain time. Artist Vanessa Beecroft, West’s longtime collaborator and the opera’s director, was still at work on costumes, including some giant masks being fashioned on-site. West looked like a friar in a creamy sweatshirt, baggy cream pants and a homemade-looking puffer vest that was the color of dirt. He was still writing the script. Each time he exited a room, a small crowd gathered, and in a repetitive ritual, he would point to those who could enter the next room with him.

Back in Cody after the holidays, West informed his design team late one day that they should report to a chartered plane before dawn. For expediency, the studio was moving back to Calabasas, sewing machines and all. By noon the following day, sewers were at work at an anonymous two-story office park building that serves as Yeezy headquarters. But the perfect hoodie was not yet to be.
In his “Follow God” video, West wears a bright orange hoodie and a beige overstuffed muslin vest that looks a little goofy, as though handmade. The hoodie was the latest iteration of the perfect hoodie, but the vest had stolen West’s attention. He had arrived at a concept for an all-muslin collection built around this vest, something that would begin to convey those fashion codes he had been formulating. There would be curved seams, because West likes circles. He would not be using any fabric blends. “There’s a Bible verse that says you should not wear a cloth made of two kinds of materials,” West said, referring to two Old Testament verses, Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11.
“This collection is couture for the service industry,” he announced one evening in February. In his Calabasas design studio—a vast room whose concrete floor was covered in canvas paint tarps—was a board that spelled out the muses for his collection: “Service Positions.” It listed many of the jobs occupied in the homes of the wealthy: housekeeper, nanny, gardener, security, chef, assistant. I wondered if this collection would be expensive. “We’re not focusing on prices right now,” he replied. “We’re only focusing on creativity.”

He had a meeting with Dawn Goldworm, the co-founder of 12.29, a New York firm that creates fragrances for companies including Christie’s, Nike and Valentino. Goldworm walked West through what amounted to a wine tasting for the nose. West returned repeatedly to the scent of dirt. She explained how she could create scents for Yeezy within two months if they scheduled a second two-hour meeting. “There’s no way this meeting can’t be that meeting?” West asked her. “I’m sold. The question is, do we do one or two or three?”
West had moved much of his personal wardrobe to a corner of the Calabasas studio, laying out Prada jeans and his own sample T-shirts on eight stainless-steel racks arranged like library stacks next to 70 pairs of size-12 Birkenstocks, square-toed Bottega Veneta sandals, Adidas foam runners and other shoes. He kept his underwear and socks at home, showering and changing into clean ones before he headed to the studio in yesterday’s clothes and finished dressing. That day he wore black-and-cream leather Yeezy Season 5 motorcycle pants that sagged in the back, revealing gray Hanes boxer briefs.

About 40 feet away, a group of designers and architects, as well as the artist Meg Webster, worked on designs for the Wyoming compound—a series of seven dome-shaped rooms to be part of a closed-loop ecology for energy and water capture. West had been consulting with the architect Claudio Silvestrin and the light artist James Turrell on the plans. Illustrations of the ecological and waste-recycling systems showed a vegetable garden, orchards, a pond and something labeled “bio pool.” One diagram detailed a “urine garden,” an aquaponic-like system that converts human waste into plant food. There was a sketch of a skate park. West mentioned something called a “hydrogen pulse detonation pump” as a shower technology. He called the entrance “the portal.”
By January, West was convinced that his puffer vest had the beginnings of an entire collection. “It spawned his new language,” says Chandler, who was still begging him to put the perfect hoodie into production.
West’s response, according to Chandler: “You can’t take three years off and then come out with a hoodie.”

West toyed with showing a women’s collection at February’s New York Fashion Week, then considered doing a show on his own schedule in Calabasas. By mid-February, he decided that he would return to Paris Fashion Week, nine days hence. “Paris should accept nothing less than actual pure genius,” he told me on February 21, a few days after he’d made a whirlwind 24-hour trip, unrelated to Yeezy, to Paris with Kim for a meeting with Jean Paul Gaultier.
The following week, Paul Johnson, a former art dealer who now works for West full-time producing various projects, flew to Paris in search of locations. Chandler flew there a few days later. In Calabasas, the design team worked until dawn, slept in nearby hotels and continued working.

Johnson booked the March 2 show for the Oscar Niemeyer–designed headquarters of France’s Communist Party, which includes a giant space-age dome that appealed to West’s affinity for circles. They leased an atelier in the Marais to finish the fledgling collection, which now included puffer crop tops, papery pants and two versions of the vest. Webster agreed to create art installations. The fashion photographer Nick Knight, a frequent West collaborator, set to work on a video installation.
“I believe that Yeezy is the McDonald’s and the Apple of apparel.” — Kanye West
Goldworm was shocked to receive a large box of Wyoming sagebrush at her New York office, with a request to turn it into the scent of Yeezy within the week.

West brought Sunday Services to Paris that weekend, inviting the fashion industry elite and other insiders. That Monday night, West was still styling models as several dozen guests sipped champagne beside Webster’s installations of grasses, and a dirt pile that the artist concocted with hollow framing and soil instead of her usual solid earth. “If that was solid, you would sense it,” Webster said, nodding toward the dirt. Goldworm checked the scent diffusers. Johnson walked by wearing a perfect hoodie that West had given him on a visit to Cody.

The horns of 50 rented cars in the street provided the blaring soundtrack for the 18 raw looks, presented outside, which opened with a beige cropped tank and pants of swirly raw wool. In those earthy Yeezy colors, there were the homemade-looking puffer vests and jackets, rubbery pants and papery pants, and hoodies inspired by hazmat suits that seem, in hindsight, remarkably Covid-19-ready. There was a new moon-boot design that West says is his favorite Yeezy shoe ever. Six-year-old North West, his and Kim’s eldest child, who is a bit of a mini-Ye, performed a rap ditty, and then the event was over.
Backstage, West seemed more excited about North’s performance than his own. “I’m really feeling like a dad now!” he said, breathless. He paused and noted, “All this—one week from a vest!”

In the end, the reviews were good. Cathy Horyn called the Yeezy collection “sharply focused” in The Cut. There was a Trump-related backlash when the singer Anohni, in an Instagram post she later deleted, struck out at the fashion industry for attending West’s Sunday Services in Paris that weekend.
After Paris, the collection was shipped to London, where it was photographed by Nick Knight, who is creating a website and an app to sell Yeezy direct-to-consumer with weekly drops. It then went to New York, where fabric orders went out. Despite the disruptions of coronavirus quarantines, Chandler says business is continuing, and the pieces will begin to drop within 90 days. The prices will not be Costco, nor will those goods be sold there. Instead, West’s team is aiming for a price range known as contemporary, one notch cheaper than luxury goods.

West flew from Paris to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to work on music, then holed up with his family in Calabasas in mid-March as coronavirus concerns swept the U.S. In an evening phone call, he told me he has changed his mind again—he’ll sell his perfect hoodies after all, saying, “The hoodie is arguably the most important piece of apparel of the last decade.” The day before, he had made donations to charities in Los Angeles and in Chicago’s South Side, where he grew up, which will go to providing meals for families and the elderly affected by the outbreak. A few days later, as government officials and hospitals pleaded for manufacturers to shift to producing masks and gowns, West asked his atelier to look into the feasibility.

I once told West that he reminded me of those Hasbro toys introduced in the ’70s called Weebles, whose tagline was “Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.” He nodded. “We fall down and we get back up. That’s the sign of champions.” Later he noted, “Anything I do, three times a year, people say, ‘Whoa, that’s the end. That’s the last we’ll see of him!’ People say I’m out of control. I’m not out of control. I’m out of their control.”

@ANTI

dope article. pictures were cool too

Awesome article

Some great Ye moments in this

“I do not like the word ambitious. I’m Kanye West. The word ambitious is beneath my abilities,” he said. “I’m just a doer.” He added, “You can see in my eyes there’s not one bit of fear.”

Excited for the weekly Yeezy drops too:

the collection was shipped to London, where it was photographed by Nick Knight, who is creating a website and an app to sell Yeezy direct-to-consumer with weekly drops.

Should start within 3 months

hope all his ideas come to fruition, plus need that perfect hoodie asap

damn these pictures are cold as f***

“You can see in my eyes there’s not one bit of fear.”

you're backkkk , much love to you bro hope you're doing better

Yeezy Sound

yeah im amazing bro !! thanks for asking

hope you good too inmidst of this pandemic

"Im out of their control"

Thats my GOAT

I want that hoodie

man they really did ye dirty with the kinski pic

WAIT NEW ALBUM IN SPRING WHAT?????

there's no way this man isnt the absolute GOAT

what a f***ing legend

I'M NOT OUT OF CONTROL I'M JUST NOT IN THEY CONTROL