Kanye West Says He Stopped Making Merch: ‘I Wasn’t Pushing Myself Enough’
Written by SOURCE on March 3, 2020
Kanye West made his return to Paris Fashion Week on Monday, complete with a surprise performance by his and Kim Kardashian‘s daughter North.
In comments given to journalists ahead of the PFW presentation for the Yeezy Season 8 collection, West elaborated on his previous comments about the concept of a t-shirt serving as a reluctant entry point into the fashion world.
“I stopped doing merch, like, four months ago, and then we started working on the opera because I wasn’t pushing myself enough,” West said Monday, per Highsnobiety.
West then recalled moments in which he pulled in a million dollars a night in merch, though he again stressed the undermining logic at play when he was first pushed to merely stick to t-shirts.
“I remember when I first started in fashion and we did the first Kanye collections, everyone kept saying, ‘Just do a t-shirt, The Row started with a t-shirt’ because they had to do this celebrity comparison,” he said. “And we fought to not do t-shirts, and then I looked up and I was only doing t-shirts. So we stopped, and we started focusing on changing, making new shapes.”
West also told attending journalists that, in terms of Yeezy Season 8, experimentation is key.
“The wool will be [from the sheep on my ranch],” he said, adding that he and his team are in the process of finding “different ways to approach things.”
West also addressed his architecture-centered endeavors, which have recently included work with Claudio Silvestrin and James Turrell, as well as teased the “very wabi-sabi” spaces he has in progress. Read more of West’s pre-PFW comments here.
