Inspirations
Ye: The Apprentices
Why It's Here
The giant this time isn't a designer. He's a musician who insisted on being one.
Ye, the artist born Kanye West, never trained as a designer, and fashion's own gatekeeping made sure he heard about it. What he built instead was a circle: young, largely self-taught creatives he pulled close, put to work, and pushed into rooms they hadn't been let into yet. Several of them now run the houses that run fashion. This is that lineage.
The Path In
From a rapper's side project to a seat at the table
Kanye West's fashion ambitions predate his acceptance by fashion itself: an early clothing line, Pastelle, never fully released; a Louis Vuitton sneaker collaboration in 2009 that raised eyebrows for a musician working with a French luxury house; years of being publicly skeptical about whether the industry would ever let him design rather than just wear. He founded DONDA, his creative agency, around 2011 and 2012, less a fashion label than a workshop for ideas across music, product, and image. Yeezy, his long-running partnership first with Nike and then Adidas starting in 2013, became the commercial proof that his instincts translated into product people actually bought, at a scale most designers never reach.
The apprentices below all passed through some version of that orbit, DONDA, the Yeezy shows, or the loose creative collective around it, before becoming the names running fashion's biggest houses today.
The Apprentices
Where they went from there
Virgil Abloh. Crossed paths with Kanye in Chicago in the early 2000s, the two bonding over art, architecture, and fashion well before they worked together, then formalized that relationship in 2009 with a joint internship at Fendi in Rome. Went on to art-direct for DONDA and work on the Watch the Throne era, then built Off-White before becoming artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear in 2018, the first African American designer to hold that role at a house of that size. Read the fuller story in his own chapter.
Demna. The Georgian designer, known mononymously as Demna, founded Vetements before becoming artistic director of Balenciaga in 2015. He and Kanye were close collaborators on the Yeezy runway shows' styling and staging, a cross-pollination that shaped both Yeezy's oversized silhouette and Demna's own Balenciaga-era language.
Jerry Lorenzo. Founded Fear of God in 2013 and became a close Yeezy collaborator on show styling and creative direction in the years after, building his own label's minimalist, oversized silhouette in close conversation with that same world before Fear of God grew into its own major American label, with its own Adidas and Nike partnerships since.
Matthew Williams. Cut his teeth working with DONDA alongside Virgil Abloh before founding his own label, 1017 ALYX 9SM, then served as creative director of Givenchy from 2020 to 2023, another DONDA alumnus running a French house.
Heron Preston. A member of the same early-2010s creative circle, Been Trill, the collective he founded alongside Virgil Abloh, Matthew Williams, and Justin Saunders, before launching his own label and later working as a creative consultant for Nike.
Why It Belongs Here
None of them came up through a traditional fashion school pipeline. They came up through a room Ye built and then made sure stayed open behind him. That's the same lineage this house is trying to be part of.
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