While accepting the Footwear News award for "Shoe Of The Year" last night, Kanye let the world in on a few details behind his contract with Adidas and Yeezy Season 1. As a company who wants to make money is wont to do, Adidas really didn't give Kanye much budget to work with for his first clothing collection for the brand. As per usual, it's a bit of a rambler that touches on his comeback from the Taylor Swift incident, designing clothes on the computer and layering in Hawaii—he calls his speeches "mood boards" as they ebb and flow from one topic to another in an occasionally incoherent manner for about 20 minutes.
But between talking about all the other things not related to making the Yeezy Boosts, just before the 15:00 mark, 'Ye mentions the work that went into Yeezy Season 1. He says "The [adidas] contract said 25 SKUs, and the fashion show I was supposed to do a collection with 25 SKUs—I don’t know how that was supposed to happen,. And the original talent budget was $500,000—I don’t know how I was supposed to put a design team together for that, but luckily I was a multi-millionaire rapper and I covered the rest of it.” He even turns the other Adidas team on stage and says "I hooked you guys up."
At least he has a sense of humor about it. I really just wonder how much it really cost him because with him, it's never about just doing it. It has to be crazy and over-the-top. You definitely know that he paid way more than half a mil to get it all done. Well now that this is done, where is SWISH? That's all we want to know.
You can watch the entire acceptance speech above.
