Today, on Kanye West’s 44th birthday, Gap dropped a first look at its Yeezy collection with the rapper.
Yeezy Gap is serving an aperitif of sorts with a single bright-blue puffer jacket priced at $200. Spotted on West last week, the recycled-nylon jacket is billowy and oversize with massive sleeves and no closures. The Yeezy Gap “YZY” logo marks the interior.
Preorders have begun on Gap’s website in the United States and will ship in the fall. To access it, you have to enter your contact info, shirt size, pants size, shoe size, and hat size — more hints of what’s to come. You’re then taken to a “waiting room,” the virtual equivalent to standing in line for a Yeezy pop-up, before you’re taken to the jacket’s page. Accompanying the launch are “Floating Projections” of the Yeezy Gap Round Jacket around New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
Last year, Gap announced a ten-year partnership with West, which would include “modern, elevated basics for men, women, and kids at accessible price points” and be developed by the Yeezy Design Studio with West as creative director and British Nigerian designer Mowalola Ogunlesi as design director. The news came in June, only a few months after Gap reacted to the pandemic by closing thousands of stores, furloughing thousands of employees, and “postponing indefinitely” a collaboration with New York–based fashion brand Telfar.
West had been manifesting this moment since 2015, when he told Style.com, “I’d like to be the Steve Jobs of the Gap. I’m not talking about a capsule. I’m talking about full Hedi Slimane creative control of the Gap.” According to Bloomberg, his partnership with Gap is estimated to be worth as much as $970 million.
