It was Paris Fashion Week in February. I knew that Kanye West had just announced that his first collection, brought to you by Adidas, was about to be revealed. Anxiously waiting for the Yeezy Season 1 Movie to be posted on Youtube, I sat around in my boxers anticipating the drop asking myself shit like, “What could this collection possibly consist of? Is it gonna to be exactly like the A.P.C. x Kanye collection that dropped summer of last year?”

The video finally came out. In complete silence, I watched the entire 12-minute video from start to finish, letting out eclectic squeals and “This is flames” over and over throughout. It was everything that I had hoped for and better. Oversized sweaters (Note: At the time, I had an obsession with oversized sweaters; anything similar to the A.P.C. x Kanye Airport Putty Sweater.), military inspired parkas and camoflauge jackets, and a salmon colored shirt that I literally had to have. I was incredibly excited to get my hands on a few of these pieces. Moreso, I was thinking, “Wow Kanye finally was able to bring his dream to life. Cheap clothing with a luxurious feel to it; something he’s been raving about how he wants to produce and create, so the barriers of classism can begin to gradually feel less marginalized.” Despite people thinking the clothing was ragged, basic, ugly, and nothing special enough to be considered in the realm of high fashion, I knew what he was doing in regards to his vision of futuristic military-chic meeting high fashion, which I secretly think was a metaphor; having distressed clothing but in a high fashion setting to demonstrate the barriers of classism need to be taken down, and one means of doing this is through fashion. Kind of like Paris Fashion Week being the Hunger Games and Ye being Katniss Everdeen.

Sadly, I was tremendously mistaken.

On March 5th, Highsnobiety.com found out, through “insider sources”, that the collection was actually going to be incredibly expensive. And I’m not talking like, A.P.C. x Kanye level expensive. I’m talking straight-out-of-the-Italian-warehouse-I-just-fucked-your-bitch-in-some-Gucci-flip-flops levels of expensive. Taking a quote from Highsnobiety’s latest article concerning the prices:

Accessibly-priced, it is not: hoodies and crewnecks are priced between $496 and $1,560, sweatpants are $545 and outerwear will reach over $3,000, while the duck boot will go for $585.

I was in disarray. Shocked, infuriated, angry, gassy, irritated, surprisingly didn’t cry, but most of all: I was disappointed.

Yeezy Season 1, was a failure in my, and many other consumers’ eyes.

Now, if you know me in real life well enough, you would know that I’m a huge Kanye West fan. I’ve supported him through all of the good times, like marrying Kim Kardashian, dropping Yeezus even though most people didn’t understand where he was coming from, deciding to name is kid North, dropping Only One on New Years Eve, and finally getting a designing gig with Adidas. I’ve also been through him with the bad; the constant internet hate, Glanstonbery, the thing he said about Beck, Sway in the morning, and many numerous erratic things he’s done over the years. But this…this I could not support. I don’t think words can describe how excited I was for Yeezy Season 1 to come into fruition, but then something like this happens and I can’t help but think that all of this was out of Kanye’s hands. No, no that doesn’t even sound logical. In my perspective, here are the reasons why Childish Gambino was right when he said Ye lied to us (different context, same point).

Well, for starters, the prices are considerably high for a collection that is just starting out.

You have 2 sides to this argument. On one hand, people are saying things like, “Well Kanye obviously couldn’t have complete control of the pricing,” which, to our knowledge might be completely true. We aren’t going to know the intricacies of an agreement among 2 entities. That’s just how it is. Then you have the other side which consists of, “How the fuck did he not know that this was going to be incredibly expensive? Ugh Kanye lied to us! No one is going to buy this garbage collection,” which is also kind of true. If you really do have complete creative control over a collection, shouldn’t you also be able to allocate the prices accordingly? There in lies the inconsistency between both arguments. Essentially, we don’t know if he actually had control over all the prices, but I can definitely say that he constantly talked about how he appreciated the stuff that H&M and Zara did, which was make clothing for fashionable people at lower prices. Not to mention, during his Oxford University lecture, he used the comparison of clothing to food, trying to get his point that clothes should not cost as much as necessities, such as cars. This is the complete opposite to everything he said. Which kind of ties into my second point…

How can you rant about how the people can’t get affordable clothing because of classism, yet your collection costs more than current designer pieces?

Of which baffles me substantially. I mean, he talked about how people deserve to look dope and classist barriers within the fashion industry are becoming too much of an issue and he wants to put an end to it. Then, you pretty much throw all the shit you talked about for 2+ years out the fucking window and release a fashion collection with an opposite school of thought? Like, you legitimately went back on everything you so passionately preached about, and then proceeded to leave all of the people you promised these things to in the dust. You never even brought it up again. Hell, no one around you (interviews and such) even talked about the pricing. That isn’t genuine. Quite frankly, it’s actually pretty shitty. Shit, even Fear of God and and off–white aren’t even as expensive as this (for the most part).

This is how you debut an initial collection?

I know, I know. Virgil Abloh and Jerry Lorenzo were able to do what Kanye is kind of trying to do: Start a collection of clothing off the bat with high prices. The issue is, though, is that they never exactly promised that any of their stuff is supposed to be cheap, and I see a ton of people comparing those guys to what Kanye is trying to do. Pyrex Vision was not even as expensive as off–white currently is, and Jerry…is Jerry (I’m not exactly a huge fan of Fear of God, namely because I thought the entire Vintage Rock Tee collection was a really shitty campaign.). Either way, I just find it ridiculous that as a debut collection, it’s all the way up to Balmain level prices, but produced by a company that’s always known for being second place.

Honestly though, I get it. We as fans were never promised anything. The collection is still going to sell out incredibly fast anyway. Despite whatever I’m saying, if you put Kanye’s name on anything nowadays, people will line up for it. Personally, I’ll be skipping everything about this. It was astonishingly off-putting that the prices were so incredibly high, but furthermore it just makes it seem like everything Kanye said about breaking barriers was a gateway for him to get gassed up all the way until a design house decided to work with him.