Fashion
What Is Ye Trying to Tell Us Now?
His new clothing collection has words and letters in a foreign language, the message of which is unclear. But people are buying it.
When Ye speaks, his fans listen. Even if they have no idea what the heck he’s saying.
This was on display in recent weeks as the artist formerly known as Kanye West released another crop of clothes through his Yzy Supply web shop, including a number of austere pieces with Cyrillic and Greek lettering on them. The stark website provided no clues as to the messages featured on the clothes. Kanyeologists were stumped.
“Would be nice to know what it’s actually saying,” one reaction on the Yeezy Subreddit read.
“What do these mean,” another user wondered.
It is, of course, prudent to understand what a shirt says before purchasing it. A Mets fan would never wish to buy a jersey that says “Yankees” in Russian. But that vigilance is all the more understandable when it comes to Ye, whose spate of antisemitic and offensive comments, in 2022 resulted in his reputational self-immolation. Adidas, which had a longstanding, and lucrative, partnership with Ye, severed ties with the musician. The Creative Artists Agency dropped him as a client.
Some of Ye’s strident fans continue to exhibit a sense of befuddlement, if not trepidation, over the messages on his clothes — particularly those conveyed through his revitalized Yeezy label. The Kanye and Yeezy subreddits are rich with threads of users debating the true meaning behind the graphics and non-English phrases.
An earlier series of clothes printed with “Black Dogs” in Russian spurred one Redditor to probe if anyone knew the meaning of the phrase.
“I want to order one, but for understandable reasons I want to know where the phrase originates from,” the Redditor wrote. The resulting answers were scattershot and perhaps unserious: It was a Russian propaganda dog whistle, a Led Zeppelin reference, an omen of death.