Kanye West gave a rare appearance yesterday on “Ellen” and, naturally, there was no shortage of headline-worthy pull quotes. But for Yeezy stans who’ve been sleeping with one eye open, waiting for his Adidas collaboration to drop, there was no more exciting moment than when he talked about his upcoming line. Kanye started things off, explaining that the past couple of years that propelled him to have equal notoriety for his monologues as well as his music were his “terrible twos.”
“I was going through my version of my terrible twos. My daughter wants to express herself but she doesn’t have the words for it. For me, there’s so many things I want to do with film, clothing and I just didn’t have the words or the resources or the backing or perception that I could do it being that I’m a rapper,” he said, echoing many speeches he’s given before about racism in the fashion industry and no one’s willingness to fund him.
But for Kanye, Adidas is a fresh breath of air—literally. “Now, because of this Adidas deal, they allowed me a little bit of oxygen,” he said. “The idea of money vs. creativity—there’s no amount of money that someone could give you to make you not be creative if you were born to create. A lot of times people try to block your creativity, control you with money, and Adidas allowed me to make my own whole clothing line, which I wanted to do, and it was just like a little bit of oxygen.”
Continuing with that metaphor, Kanye recalled how suffocating it was before he joined Adidas. “Two years ago, you guys are seeing someone being suffocated by perception, by people in the position that could blatantly see, ‘Wow, the Yeezys did really good. He was this influential. All those albums did this, but we’re not going to give him a shot in something else.’”
Even though Kanye is somewhat of a loose canon, Adidas should be thanking their lucky stars they landed Kanye. I mean, what other celebrity spokesperson would compare not being at a company to near-death? That is loyalty. Plus, Kanye’s line for them seems to be shaping up quite well. Theophilus London, who’s seen it, gave it high praise, and Kanye (of course) agrees.
“There’s a lot of people who were really calm about that but the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and expecting different results,” he said, perhaps edging in a dig to Nike. “So, I tried something different over the past couple of years, and I actually got some really good results from it.”
Exciting stuff. Unfortunately, a first look at the designs and a release date both remain to be seen, but we’ll keep an eye out.
via News
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