It’s 2020 & the vision has never been clearer.
“I love merch, but we did merch as a punk answer to us being told we can’t work at Louis Vuitton, Versace, Nike,” he said in an excerpt obtained by Complex. “Merch started as one of the only things we could control. When we did our first fashion show, in crocodile and all these exotic fabrics, there was just a block, like, ‘No, you can’t get in. No, you can’t be involved with this.’ Somehow, I actually had to go back and start with a T-shirt.”
As visual aesthetic plays a major factor in everything Kanye does, he explained how designing t-shirts and clothes applies to a larger creative vision that he has in mind for the future. “I think we can break the class system,” West said. “This sweatshirt is the blank that we used for merch. In the setting, it feels very elegant, but it’s a very simple cut design—all of the energy and ingenuity. It’s so much time that went into finding the simplest version… That’s what artists do; they take everything that’s happening in life and sometimes encapsulate it into an hour and a half of Eddie Murphy on stage, or Dave Chappelle, or 16 bars inside of a verse, or the cut of a sweatshirt or a boot.”
Along with that, he said his concept homes powered by water and wind are “very close” to being available to the public. “I didn’t come in to make merch. I came in to make operas,” he said. “That’s no knock to merch and no knock to T-shirts, but now it’s time to change the architecture. It’s time to design cities.”
