Kanye West rocked up to the Footwear News Achievement Awards in New York last night to collect his Shoe of the Year award for the Yeezy Boost 350s and he did not prepare a speech. Fortunately for us, Kanye off-the-cuff is a formula for acceptance speech gold.
“I have absolutely no plans for what I’m going to say, so this could land completely wrong, but it doesn’t really fucking matter, does it?,” Kanye opens, joking, “If you don’t like 10-minute profanity-ridden speeches that end with a presidential bid, you can go to the bathroom”.
In a wide ranging speech that covered why he wasn’t wearing a suit jacket — “If my wife’s not here, no suit jacket” — and included a story about sneaking into an Alexander McQueen show, Yeezus brought up that time when he less legitimately took to an awards stage: “After the infamous Taylor Swift moment did a sort of self exile just to get away from paparazzi and have people not, you know, just fucking with me, really,” he said, before explaining that, “The first thing I did was I went to Japan and it was me and Virgil Abloh, who has the brand Off White, and we just sat on a computer every day with this idea of designing. We designed on the computer so much we started to joke, ‘Hey, did you wash my jpg?'” — we have no idea if this was transcribed correctly, but anyway, jokes.
“I remember always going back to the fashion shows, not because I wanted to be seen in some really expensive rapper jacket that I’d just bought. It was because I cared so much about seeing artists express themselves to the maximum,” Kanye said, before musing on his own work: “As a creator, it doesn’t matter how big your house is, how big your name is, how much money you have, your job is to create while you’re here and if anyone is in the way of that, if anything gets in the way of that, you got to burn it to the fucking ground”.
“I want to fucking draw shoes, and it doesn’t matter if someone thinks that I’m supposed to be doing something that’s more important,” he said before thanking Adidas for giving him, “the opportunity, especially this first run, to make ’em however I want to make ’em. They didn’t say, ‘You got to make the logo four times bigger than the shoe'”. Though he did note that they could have been more forthcoming with the staffing budget: “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’m a multi-millionaire rapper and I covered the rest of it”.
He rounded the speech up by saying, “I’m trying to take a full ‘Will Ferrell drunk brother at the wedding’ vibe. Have I reached that level yet? Here’s to fucking everything up!”.
Credits
Text Charlotte Gush
Photography Peter Hutchins