07 Oct You Want the Future, Here Is the Future

There are images that arrive before their time. This is the story of a method I have seen repeated, in different forms, without ever asking it what its name was.

I saw Back in the Days, Jamel Shabazz’s photography book. I bought it on instinct.

Those images told the story of New York kids through their clothes, postures, attitudes: a culture that seemed to have already found its own visual language.

For a few years, the book just sat there, waiting.

Then my curiosity came back. A photograph, a collection, a campaign.

Koto Bolofo, the acclaimed photographer, identified Islington, in North London, as the place to look for young people in the mid-2000s, unwitting descendants of the kids photographed by Shabazz, carrying that same attitude they continued to express without knowing where it came from.

He explained, and I watched them listen carefully.

That scene already contained one of Hip Hop’s defining characteristics: taking what already exists, moving it, modifying it, and transforming it into something that belongs to a new generation.

The first signs: in 1996, at Romeo Gigli, Tupac appeared with his girlfriend Kidada Jones. Accompanied by his bodyguards, he walked the runway for the SS97 men’s collection in a gold outfit, wearing the unmistakable Death Row Records medallion. That same week, still in Milan, he performed California Love at the presentation of Gianni Versace.

A body and a language that were not expected in those rooms, welcomed by the audience out of curiosity, out of fashion, without yet understanding what was really about to happen.

A deeper transformation was already taking shape in the streets.

Dapper Dan, in Harlem, had understood the power of luxury codes. He took the logos and materials of the major fashion houses, reconstructed them onto his own garments, and returned them to a different audience. The process resembled sampling: an existing material was isolated, manipulated, recomposed, and given a new identity.

That same logic, already present in Shabazz’s photographs, would re-emerge many years later in the work of Ye.

When I met him, his project was still taking shape.

One evening, I received a phone call.

“Hi, it’s Kanye.”

He wanted to meet me.

We met at a hotel in Paris, where he had rented an entire floor. Everyone was barefoot. There were at least thirty people spread around different tables: music, video, stage, merchandising, fashion.

Ye moved from one table to another with surprising clarity.

That room was already a representation of the project he was trying to build. He talked to me about Stax: music, fashion, architecture, food, images, everything within a single identity. A kind of contemporary Bauhaus.

I listened to him and thought it was madness.

But it was exactly the kind of madness I was looking for.

“It’s hard work,” I replied.

“Yes, I know. That’s why I need people like you.”

A week later he called to ask whether I had made up my mind. I told him yes.

He told me about his new album: Yeezus.

I listened to it, and something fell into place.

It wasn’t Rap in the way I had thought of Rap until then. It was something broader, more disturbing, harder to classify.

“I don’t think I would ever have come close to Rap without this record.”

The music made me understand the project better than any explanation could have.

Ye looked at objects as materials to be moved and recomposed, using existing garments as raw material. He was interested in their history, their surface, the memory contained within the object. The process was about making them pass through a new idea until they were transformed.

The creative team’s task: the design process between creativity and technique.

A brief note for those unfamiliar with the subject.

“The programming of a canvas.”

The first stage is the creation of a conceptual map, identifying the main themes, the atmosphere that should permeate the collection, the shapes, the appearance of the fabrics, the colours.

Drawings are produced, followed by a careful search for the “samples” to be used for shape and fit. In this specific case, they serve as the simulacrum of the final product.

Instructions are then given to the pattern makers to create the first base: a rough prototype made from white canvas fabric, simply called a “canvas” in industry jargon, on which the fit is checked and corrections are made.

At the same time, the first dyeing and washing tests are carried out on the selected fabrics, in order to assess how they react.

The first actual prototype is produced, using the chosen fabric, shape, and treatments.

The first prototype is still an intermediate stage: details are modified, construction is checked, the fit is refined, shrinkage is monitored, and the reaction of the components is assessed in the case of garment-dyeing.

Washing and overdyeing require further specific checks.

The product before the name.

Eric, a friend and colleague, was working on the project. He told me the Daft Punk story.

“He had given them some samples and asked them to work on them. The result inevitably sounded like them. Ye then handed it over to a very young DJ, asking him to completely turn it upside down. When it went back to Daft Punk, they were surprised.”

That story explained his method to me.

The phone again.

“What kind of music are you listening to these days?”

“The Eraser, by Thom Yorke.”

“Me too.”

I replied by quoting the line:

“We think the same things at the same time.”

Synchronicity, connection.

Some time later, during a work session, before we started, he put that very CD on.

The music created the mood from which the work was supposed to emerge.

Ye knew the codes of Rap deeply and understood how difficult they were to change. He used to say: “We are the new rockstars, Rap is the new Rock’n’Roll.”

How could you argue with him? There were no rockstars on the covers.

The idea of stealing a few symbols was already part of the method.

The first rupture came when he started wearing skinny jeans. He said it with a certain bitterness: his world didn’t understand it, it wasn’t ready. They tried to talk him out of it; it was considered a betrayal.

Oversize was more than a rule, it was dogma. The silhouette had a meaning, and every choice belonged to a very specific culture.

He had decided to move that code.

With Adidas came the next step: turning that idea into an industrial product.

It was the end of 2014.

The rapper was no longer simply someone who wore fashion. He was becoming an image-maker, a collaborator, and finally, a creator.

Yeezy Season 1 was about to arrive.

I made a video in which Ye launched into a hilarious little performance. It usually happened when he tried something on himself that he felt belonged to him.

“You want the future? Here is the future.”

I lost that video.

The sentence, however, remained.

Looking back at it today, that future was a way of building fashion through music, people, images, materials, and technology.

Shabazz had photographed a language while it was being born.

Dapper Dan had taken the codes of luxury and transformed them for another culture.

Ye had brought that same attitude into a creative and industrial system, to the point of changing the very process through which a product could come into being.

Three different moments of the same intuition.

Perhaps this is what Hip Hop left to fashion: the possibility of looking at what already exists as material that is still open, ready to be moved, sampled, contaminated, and returned with a new identity.

We think the same things at the same time.

Ferruccio Pozzoni