It really feels like YEEZY season. Kanye “Ye” West has resurfaced in a major way over the past few weeks, going from making a surprise appearance at Fear of God’s runway presentation to hosting his own surprise fashion show.
Now, mere days after debuting the YEEZY SEASON 10 collection by way of an impromptu “YZY FREE” event, Ye has again stepped out, this time to inspect what’s apparently his new YEEZY headquarters.
Located on Melrose Avenue, the purported YEEZY offices are rumored to be the site of a dedicated YEEZY store — perhaps this is the first YZY SPLY store we first heard about last year — and they just so happen to be down the street from an adidas store (adidas’ recent financial report confirmed ongoing pains from the YEEZY split).
But that’s neither here nor there. The big takeaway is that Ye is now in his Peter Pan era.
Gone is the workwear uniform of boxy Balenciaga jacket and Levi’s jeans tucked into Red Wing moto boots, replaced by a vintage Manchester United jersey, black leggings, and a pair of sock shoes seemingly of Ye’s own design.
The tights are a new development but the flat-soled shoes look like a new iteration of the low-profile boots Ye was seen wearing back in 2019.
Either way, pretty hard to imagine anyone but the most obsessed YEEZY fans copying Ye’s new look.
Whereas his straight-leg jeans and shit-kickin’ boots were not only stylistically distinct but quite imitable — plenty of people in Ye’s inner circle, including DJ Khaled, wore a variation of that exact look — Ye’s tights are objectively hard to swallow.
For one, it’s a tough silhouette to pull off, the baggy top with skin-tight pants, especially given menswear’s current inclination towards baggy and flared trousers.
Further, Ye’s new uniform is a pretty hard 180 from the relaxed shapes that Ye would cut in his Balenciaga, before the luxury house severed ties with Ye over his late 2022 anti-Semitic rants.
Given that every brand under the sun is currently focused on baggy cargos and loose trousers, Ye’s new uniform feels out of step. There’s an eternal demand for skinny jeans, admittedly, but tights are not jeans.
These tights and sock shoes keep in line with Ye’s recent fascination with thermal base layers, epitomized by what appeared to be sample designs — read: layered toile that looks more like long johns than actual clothing — modeled by Ye’s wife Bianca Censori and seen on Ye fanpages prior to the YEEZY SEASON 10 fashion show.
The YEEZY SEASON 10 show itself was a truly strange affair, filled with bald models street-cast by Ye and a concise pack of collaborators.
All of the models wore a skin-tight T-shirt with black pants and clutched lit candles. Unworn T-shirts were then given to attendees for free, which is presumably why the show invitation said “YZY FREE.”
Naturally, Ye’s enterprising fans immediately began trying to flip their freebies for a couple hundred bucks. Real fans and all that.
Point is, Ye’s skin-tight clothing is too niche to take off.
Of Ye’s many stylistic eras, from visvim shoes to Saint Laurent skinnies to YEEZY GAP athleisure, this new tights and sock-shoes look has to be the least approachable.
Indeed, if this is the next evolution of YEEZY, it’s a big step back from even one year ago, back when Ye was attacking a dude nearly half his age (remember that?).
