A few months ago, I posted the image above - basically saying that I like what Adidas has been putting out lately. For some reason, the post above has STAYED on the explore page and I’ve been getting hundreds of comments on that post - more than 150 THOUSAND people have seen that post and more than 7000 have chosen to interact. Why?
Early comments were good. But the vast majority of the comments I’m seeing now are from Yeezy gobblers that feel the need to point out that none of these shoes would exist without Kanye West. And, that’s great. I get it. And I KINDA agree. I get that Yeezy’s have a design language. I get that ‘Yeezy’ (the company) created a bunch of shoes that disrupted the markets. I get that Yeezy appears to be responsible for transforming the sneaker landscape in some pretty significant ways. But I think the basis of the argument is flawed. And, even if the basis were to be overlooked, I think the the importance of it is overstated..
If we think of Adidas like they’re a Pizza company…maybe something like California Pizza Kitchen…I think of Kanye’s contribution as like the BBQ Chicken Pizza. A hit, certainly, but he didn’t invent the concept of a goddam pizza. And he didn’t actually even make the pizza. He just thought…’hmm, BBQ chicken would go really well with some cheese and bread.’ The BBQ chicken pizza is a really really really good pizza. And it opened up the doors for other interesting pizza toppings. Should I complain that none of these *new* flavors pay homage to CPK? Nah. That's ridiculous.
That’s not to diminish his impact I wrote a whole 2000 word article talking about Ye's impact on sneakers for @alts.co - but it is me trying to get the gobblers to understand that the sneaker world is much, much, much bigger than Ye…and it will be around for MUCH MUCH LONGER THAN YE. And some of Adidas’ designers using some of Yeezys design language is not, in fact, robbery. it's what we can expect from sneaker design. There are hundreds of sneaker silhouettes that take elements from one another, it’s just how things go. Right?