image credit: WWD
On June 26th news of Kanye West’s 10-year collaboration with Gap Inc. was announced.
If you’ve listened to interviews or “Spaceship” you’ll know that West's interest in the brand goes beyond the entrepreneurial— he worked for the company in Chicago when he was in high school and has spoken of how formative the experience was in the past. West has discussed this collaboration as early as 2013, and if there’s one thing that we know about him it’s that his determination gets him places.
Yet, the news was still a bit surprising.
Despite his deep appreciation and fair understanding of the industry, he’s an interesting choice for a corporate, publicly-traded company because of how unpredictable he is. It seems that much of the controversy West finds himself in is steeped in a palpable narcissism and polarizing willingness to be controversial, seemingly, for its own sake.
In just the past year he has been vocal about his questionable support for Trump and questions about the ways in which he’s begun commodifying the intimate, musically-driven spiritual gatherings he organized for friends and family, which he calls Sunday Service, have arisen. The way he’s gone about elevating the cultural and spiritual importance of Black churches has raised questions about his intentions and sincerity. While not bound to the binary of good or bad, self-serving or community focused, understanding where he stands on the spectrum is important considering the influence he wields.
And yet, having ostensibly contradictory views is one of the things West has become most known for. In the last few weeks he has joined protests in the South Side of Chicago, where he grew up, and has donated to the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd as well as to Black-owned businesses across the country. And it would be careless to not include the fact that the Sunday Service seems to have begun as a personal project, perhaps even a healing project, after he was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, which is certainly not an easy thing to go through privately let alone in the public eye.
His actions are not mutually exclusive from one another— after all, they all come from him— and considering how relentlessly demanding celebrity culture is, particularly for Black people, it would be especially difficult to make definitive declarations on Kanye West. However, given the fervor with which it appears he seeks to stay in the limelight, it’s difficult not to.
image credit: Kanye West
News of this collaboration seemed exciting, perhaps even inevitable depending on how you look at it.
That was until many of us fashion enthusiasts, particularly those who are interested in work that actually departs from the industry’s norms, were left scratching our heads: What about the collaboration with Telfar?
Did I somehow miss it?
I don't think I did.
Let me check Instagram...
Wait...
What about Telfar?
Telfar is the eponymous brand by Telfar Clemens, a New York native and 2017 CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund Winner, who became a familiar name when he created the first real “it” bag since the portable bamboo structure by Cult Gaia took closets everywhere by storm during the summer of 2017. (P.S. No, the decorative Jacquemus bag of last year doesn’t count, we can discuss it another time.) It wasn’t simply that Telfar’s caryall was well made or well designed— it is both— what distinguished it from its predecessors was that it was made by a Black designer, created to be worn by everyone. Especially queer, Black people. He stands oppositional to monolithic luxury brands who are too deep in their algorithm-based, myopic views of luxury— who create by and for these parameters, and consequently only sell bland and generic products. Telfar’s bag spoke to something more. In supple vegan leather, offered in an assortment of colors and sizes, with a declarative, embossed T logo that takes up a lot of space on the front panel, recognizable and ubiquitous, he made his message very clear: luxury is for everyone.
In an industry that has largely tokenized, appropriated from, diminished, and ignored non-white, non-cisgender, non-heterosexual people, this is a powerful statement. Soon cool people all over the city were wearing the bag, T-side out. Afterwards sceney people who can afford to change their clothes and accessories on a weekly basis started using it, then Sonja Morgan, and its status as the bag was cemented in an article by The Cut celebrating the bag. By that point Telfar’s colorful “shopping bag” was commonly being referred to as the “Bushwick Birkin” with an immense amount of pride.
And that’s just it.
Pride is the operative word when discussing Telfar. If you watch videos online of people “unboxing” their totes their pride is visible. When someone wears Telfar their pride is visible. When people place their bag on tables and chairs and laps, anywhere but the ground, their pride is visible. When large fashion brands offer their items to non-target audiences in spite of who that customer is, regardless of who the creative director is. Clemens on the other hand, like many young designers, always offers his wears entirely because of who he is and who his clientele is.
image credit: W Magazine
The announcement in January about the collaboration between Telfar and Gap was surprising because it pretty much came out of nowhere. It was reminiscent of that brief period when CFDA Fashion Fund winners, on the cusp of great success, would design a capsule collection for Gap. It meant something that the name of a Black man who was still unknown to the uninitiated was about to become a household name.
And then information that is usually never revealed to the public inadvertently emerged when YZY x GAP was announced— we learned that the contract between Gap and Clemens was never signed. Here we see Gap, doing whatever they can to stay in business, once again at the expense of Black creatives.
What happened that Friday was an example of a symptom being cured but the disease continuing to incubate. While West is going into uncharted territory, so too was Clemens. That Gap thought substituting one for the other, as evidenced by how they handled this, would be okay speaks to the very issues at hand. This entire situation speaks to the fact that while the pie is theoretically big enough for all of us to eat, many are still not even given spoons. Worse yet, some unexpectedly and unjustly get theirs taken away.
As roads are renamed to “Black Lives Matter” place, plaza, way, street, and all the rest, and realtors make unsolicited declarations that they will stop referring to the largest bedroom in the house as the “master” room, and an overdue end to the practice of having non-Black actors voice Black characters on TV, all I see is tape being used to patch holes on a system that’s been sinking since the beginning. Is it progress? Yes, I suppose so. But these feel like the small, cosmetic changes we’ve seen before. They do little to actually address the political, economic, and professional barriers that have barred Black people, and all marginalized people for that matter, from advancing. From achieving their “American Dream.”
I categorize the aforementioned incremental changes and what happened with Gap as incomplete steps. While they speak to the times they do very little to address the future. Fashion has certainly evaded its responsibility as a foundational pillar of our culture when it comes to conversations surrounding race in the past, which raises many questions about what will come next— especially in light of Gap’s misstep during this particular moment.
Yet, answers seem to be coming.
The fact that Gap Inc. was held accountable in a very public way and is expected to compensate Clemens for the time and effort he’d already devoted to the collaboration speaks to that. The fact that Mowalola Ogunlesi, a Nigerian-born, London-raised designer, will be leading the design team for YZY x GAP speaks to that. The fact that the Black in Fashion Council has been established and is already working with brands speaks to that. The fact that Samira Nassir was the first Black woman to be appointed Editor in Chief to Harpers Bazaar speaks to that.
YZY x GAP is an idea that seems like the ultimate data point corroborating the myth of the self-made man, the perfect example of the American Dream going right for a Black man. It’s a story, though not unfamiliar, that offers the current state of the country, and its uglier past, a kind of out. In an alternate universe, does a reality in which the Telfar collaboration was released in August that wouldn’t have compromised a successful YZY x GAP launch in, say, January? Or perhaps even next June? I imagine the answer, to both, is yes. I hope that next time the answer will be yes, but more so I hope there won’t be a next time.