Kanye West is overseas at the moment taking in Paris’ fashion week, which he participated in yesterday by unveiling season 8 of his Yeezy line that included a surprise performance from daughter North. Well ahead of the show, the Chicago legend caught up with Highsnobiety and a few other journalists to talk about his new line.
In his brief chat, Kanye went on to mention the entry point for fashion is still through t-shirts, and that he wanted to get away from that. So he did. ‘Ye mentioned that he stopped making merch and t-shirts months ago to focus on his opera. He adds that he “wasn’t pushing himself enough” as reason for the change.
“I stopped doing merch, like, four months ago, and then we started working on the opera because I wasn’t pushing myself enough,” West said. “We were doing $1 million a night in merch — I remember when I first started in fashion and we did the first Kanye collections, everyone kept saying, ‘Just do a T-shirt, The Row started with a T-shirt’ because they had to do this celebrity comparison. And we fought to not do T-shirts, and then I looked up and I was only doing T-shirts. So we stopped, and we started focusing on changing, making new shapes.”
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Later, Kanye talked about the experimentation of fabrics and where he can make a change. “The wool will be [from the sheep on my ranch]. We’re just looking at different ways to approach things. 90 percent of this collection is muslin in its original fabric. We’ve been looking at how we can create a suede effect or how we can dye it. This is all experimental. Each one of the pieces here is in its infant stage. They’re all new inventions and new approaches to apparel. Now I’m looking at them and thinking, where I can take them with their colors and forms.”
Elsewhere, Kanye talks about his architectural future & creative influence, which he says he helped make the “most iconic shoe of the past 15 years.”
“We’ve presented so many things that have influenced color palettes and shapes of shoes, like the shape of the 350s that have become the most iconic shoe of the past 15 years. Now we have these new slides that we’re doing, and you’ll see that these shapes will start to affect other designers.”
Read all that & more in the interview with Highsnobiety right here.