Kanye West thinks he can "break the class system" with his fashion designs.
Kanye West
The 42-year-old rapper believes "artists" can take something small and build them into something much bigger with "energy and ingenuity".
He said: "I think we can break the class system. This sweatshirt is the blank that we used for merch. In the setting, it feels very elegant, but it's a very simple cut design--all of the energy and ingenuity. It's so much time that went into finding the simplest version...
"That's what artists do; they take everything that's happening in life and sometimes encapsulate it into an hour and a half of Eddie Murphy on stage, or Dave Chappelle, or 16 bars inside of a verse, or the cut of a sweatshirt or a boot."
The 'Famous' hitmaker always wanted his clothes to be more than just "merch" and was frustrated when he was advised to start with T-shirts and work his way from there but quickly came to realise that was the right approach.
Speaking to Lala magazine in an extract obtained by Complex, he said: "When I wanted to get into fashion, everyone would bring up The Row and how they started with t-shirts. I didn't want to start with a T-shirt.
"I love merch, but we did merch as a punk answer to us being told we can't work at Louis Vuitton, Versace, Nike. Merch started as one of the only things we could control.
"When we did our first fashion show, in crocodile and all these exotic fabrics, there was just a block, like, 'No, you can't get in. No, you can't be involved with this.' Somehow, I actually had to go back and start with a T-shirt."
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