You can call him a visionary or just plain weird, but there’s no doubt that Kanye West pushes the envelope with fashion. His collabs with adidas and GAP have been wildly successful. But if the folks at GAP should have learned anything from adidas, it should have been, never, and I mean never, ever leave Ye out of a meeting about his shit.
Just one day after Yeezy GAP teased items from the brand’s upcoming campaign with Balenciaga, the self-described genius behind the brand shared his ire on Instagram. In an August 30 Instagram post (one of two currently visible to his over 16 million followers), Ye captioned a photo of the “YR 3022 YZYGAP SHDZ” visor from the YEEZY GAP ENGINEERED BY BALENCIAGA collection, “Gap held a meeting about me without me?”
This is happening less than a month after the “Runaway” rapper went in on adidas for making decisions about the Yeezy line without his input. “Adidas made up the Yeezy day idea without my approval. Then went and brought back older styles without my approval,” West said in response to an August Yeezy Day promotional event in which adidas re-released several popular items from the Yeezy line.
To say that West is passionate about his fashion collections would be an understatement. We already told you about West defending images of customers rummaging through trash bags at GAP stores looking for various items from the Yeezy collection with no help from sales associates. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Ye doubled down and took an interview with, of all outlets, Fox News, to defend the awful customer experience. West explained that the point of making customers dig through the large bags was to share a more equal approach to clothing—a point I have a hard time accepting from someone going around selling hoodies for $240 and leggings for $140.
“Look man, I’m an innovator, and I’m not about to sit up here and apologize about my ideas,” Ye said in the interview. “That’s exactly what the media tries to do. Make us apologize for any idea that doesn’t fall under exactly the way they want us to think.”
Let’s hope that GAP learned its lesson and makes it someone’s job to ensure that any future meetings about Ye’s collections show up on his calendar.