Brand Loyalty is a column that explores one person’s obsession with a brand, silhouette, garment, or color—like Kristen Stewart embracing Outdoor Voices, Pharrell’s Vivenne Westwood hat, or Young Thug’s love for blouses.

During a very long ago and more innocent moment called September 2015, Kanye West had just shown his second season of Yeezy and, at the VMA’s few days before, announced his intention to run for president in 2020. A few hours after his fashion show, he sat down with Dirk Standen for an interview that ran on Vanity Fair, and was asked if there were any new designers “impressing” him. “As far as the new designers go, everybody knows who’s everyone’s favorite,” West said. “I told you. You remember, I was like this is the one, and that shit fucking blew up right. It’s like the No 1. Everyone’s waiting on it.”

“You’re talking about Vetements,” Standen said, referring to the Demna Gvasalia-led fashion collective responsible for fashion’s obsession with $800 hoodies and post-ironic graphics. “It’s true. You went to the showroom after their first collection and you showed me the pictures on your phone, before anyone was talking about it. And then their second collection just went boom.”

This was a month before Gvasalia was named as the creative director at Balenciaga, succeeding Alexander Wang. It’s hard to remember, now that Gvasalia has basically taken over the world, but at the time, even dedicated followers of fashion didn’t really know who he was. Upon Gvasalia’s appointment at the French fashion house, The New York Times called him “a relative unknown.”

But by the time of Gvasalia’s Balenciaga announcement, West had been publicly plugging Vetements for almost a year. In a rare move for a celebrity, especially one who takes fashion as seriously as West, he had been wearing one of the first Vetements sweatshirts—a black oversized hoodie with the brand’s name in a heavy metal typeface—over and over again. At Paris Fashion Week in March 2015, he wore it two days in a row, most famously on the way into the Dior show (Raf Simons’s penultimate!), where he posed with Lorde, the two of them glaring like sage goth overlords. He was perhaps the brand’s best customer and almost certainly their best advertiser, making their off-beat, very giant clothing recognizable to a mass audience who had probably barely heard of Margiela, the brand for which Gvasalia and his seven anonymous designers had also worked, and to whom Vetements owes both an aesthetic and ideological debt. In fact, West even hired Gvasalia work as a designer on Yeezy Season 1, which he’d shown earlier that year to extremely mixed reviews.