How Kanye West plans to create the perfect hoodie

«The hoodie is arguably the most important piece of apparel of the last decade», said Kanye West during his last, long interview with the Wall Street Journal, reiterating a concept expressed throughout his career as a designer, looking at sportswear as one of the youngest and purest expressions of the fashion world. In 2015, in a rare interview with Vanity Fair on Yeezy's Season 2, Kanye said:

«Sweatshirts are fucking important. That might sound like the funniest quote ever. How can you say all this stuff about running for president in 2020 and then say sweatshirts are important? But they are. Just mark my words».

Kanye West is no longer running for president in 2020, but it's hard to misconception his prediction a few years ago, after hoodies and sweatshirts became the keystone of the streetwear explosion, the canvas on which all kinds of designer tried to express his creativity. Now, however, Kanye wants to design "the perfect hoodie":

«Slightly cropped at the waist, heavy as a winter coat, it would be like comfort food, biblical in its ability to soothe but futuristic in its reach. In a color like flax or dusty stone—a palette Jesus might have worn—it would be made for the masses, sold for $60».

Kanye has once again expressed a desire to try to "democratize" the apparel, which was the motive behing his decision of moving Yeezy's production to America, and to like the idea that Yeezy and the perfect hoodie are put up for sale in the retail chains, such as Costco: «I like Costco as an idea. I also like Walmart.» Kanye, on the other hand, is the same person who made Gildan famous to the general European audience, and who used Samples of American Apparel to make all the uniforms of the members of the Sunday Service. In the Wall Street Journal interview - in which politics, MAGA hat and Sunday Service were widely discussed - Kanye said he considered:

«I believe that YEEZY is the McDonald’s and the Apple of apparel. In order to make the Apple of apparel the next Gap, it has to be a new invention. To invent something that’s so good that you don’t even get credit for it because it’s the norm».

The idea that kept buzzing in Kanye's head all last summer was always the perfect hoodie, because «you can't take three years off and then come out with a hoodie.» Kanye seems to have shown the closest thing to the perfect hoodie in the Follow God video, with the orange hoodie worn along with a puffer vest, which in the following months almost came to oust the hoodie in his thoughts: «He had arrived at a concept for an all-muslin collection built around this vest, something that would begin to convey those fashion codes he had been formulating,» Binkley wrote, also stating that he would not use any mixture of fabric because «There’s a Bible verse that says you should not wear a cloth made of two kinds of materials.»

It's often hard to take Kanye West's words and even intentions seriously. Even in the interview with the Wall Street Journal the rapper and designer continued to look like a man in eternal contradiction with himself - he said that the backlash immediately after wearing the "MAGA" was classist, and that as a black man with a MAGA hat he felt discriminated as before he became famous - often irritating in his willingness to want at all costs provoke. At the same time, however, Kanye West remains the man who initiated one of the biggest aesthetic revolutions of the last decade, and who could continue to influence the fashion world more than we can even imagine. Starting with the perfect hoodie.