Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, signed a lucrative deal with Gap in 2020.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
- Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, is working with Balenciaga on an upcoming Yeezy Gap collection.
- Ye signed a 10-year deal to produce apparel for Gap in 2020 under the Yeezy Gap brand.
- A $90 Yeezy Gap hoodie recently broke a single-day sales record for the apparel brand.
Yeezy Gap is getting some help from the high-fashion designer behind Kim Kardashian’s blacked-out Met Gala look.
The brand announced Friday that fashion house Balenciaga will join forces with Kanye West, who recently changed his name to Ye, for a “new creative exploration within the Yeezy Gap universe.” The collection, known as “Yeezy Gap engineered by Balenciaga,” will arrive in 2022, the brand announced.
The Balenciaga collaboration with be available “alongside continued Yeezy Gap releases,” the brand said.
“It is a vision come true to work with Gap and Demna, the creative director of Balenciaga, to make incredible product available to everyone at all times,” Ye said in an interview with Vogue on Friday.
Ye and Demna, who recently asked the press to call him by his first name only, are already close friends and collaborators: Demna was the creative director behind much of Ye’s “Donda” listening events in 2021 and designed a t-shirt sold at the events, according to Vogue.
Demna has also collaborated with Ye’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Kim Kardashian West, who wore a Balenciaga-designed black catsuit that covered her entire body to the 2021 Met Gala.
Demna has been Balenciaga’s creative director since 2015. The fashion house, owned by luxury goods conglomerate Kering, showed its first couture collection since the 1960s this past July, and Ye was in attendance wearing — what else — a black puffer jacket from the Yeezy Gap collection.
Demna told Vogue that designing a collection for Gap is “a very different challenge.”
“I’ve always appreciated the utilitarianism and the accessibility of Gap,” he told the magazine. “I share some of the same sensibilities in my creative language. This project allowed me to join forces [with Ye] to create utilitarian fashion for all.”
Ye signed a 10-year deal with Gap in 2020 with the promise to create men’s, women’s, and kids’ apparel under the Yeezy Gap moniker. While terms of the deal were never disclosed, West told actor and podcast host Nick Cannon in 2020 that his net worth nearly doubled, from $3.3 billion to $5 billion, after signing with Gap.
The collaboration has paid off for Gap, too: The Yeezy Gap $90 hoodie, which launched in September, delivered the most sales in a single day in Gap.com’s history, the company said in its third-quarter earnings in November . The hoodie and the Yeezy Gap puffer jacket have since popped up on resale sites for more than double their original prices.
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