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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.
The latest batch of Yeezy clothes contains more confounding sloganeering. Hoodies, sweats, shorts and jackets carry Russian words roughly translating to “Herald Tribune.” Whether this is a reference to the bygone international newspaper or merely a wink to the vox populi is not clear. Experts say the terse phrase doesn’t hold any hidden meaning in Russian.
“It doesn’t evoke any obvious Russian references,” Tatyana Gershkovich, an associate professor of Russian studies at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in an email. “From my bit of Googling, it seems that the two words together are only on Kanye’s clothes.”
Similarly, Eliot Borenstein, a professor of Russian and Slavic studies at New York University, felt the phrase wouldn’t ring bells for Russian readers.
“If you are a Russian speaker who has never heard of the newspaper, the phrase would not make sense,” he wrote via email. “It’s not hyphenated, so it looks like two random nouns thrown together.”
An email to a contact at the Yeezy website went unanswered.
Another series of clothes features a trio of Greek-looking letters, which were “just shy of gibberish,” according to Marcus Folch, an associate professor of classics at Columbia University.
The letters, as he noted over email, appeared to form a graphic play on YZY. “It looks cool,” Mr. Folch said. “But it has nothing to do with Greek.” The N’s, he noted, are printed backward.
In one sense, Yeezy’s linguistic plays are a fading echo of a modest trend from a few years ago when streetwear-tinged brands printed Cyrillic words on their clothes. The actual texts were never that meaningful, as when the American designer Heron Preston sold shirts with the word “style” in Russian. Chekhov this was not.
Still, there was something graphically alluring about Cyrillic, a blocky alphabet that was inscrutable to American shoppers. It became a tool for designers looking to sprinkle some international intrigue onto otherwise elemental hoodies and tees.
The trendy use of Russian script slipped away as Russia reasserted its military might and had all but ceased by the onset of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
If Yeezy is wresting back this trend, the impulse is undoubtedly coming from the label’s head of design, the Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy. In December 2023, when Ye rejoined X and appointed Mr. Rubchinskiy, the announcement raised eyebrows in the fashion world.
For several years, Mr. Rubchinskiy’s collections — a mélange of throwback sportswear, cobbled together militaria and startlingly mature tailoring — had been received rapturously by critics and retailers. He was hailed as a generational talent as he racked up collaborations with Adidas, Burberry, Levi’s and Dr. Martens. Some of Mr. Rubchinskiy’s clothes featured Cyrillic phrases and logo marks, a design detail he has, evidently, carried over to Yeezy.
And then, in 2018, a 16-year-old model accused Mr. Rubchinskiy of soliciting indecent images from him. He denied the allegations and continued to design, but the industry cooled to him. In Mr. Rubchinskiy, Ye found a kindred exile from the runway fashion system.
Though the Yeezy line continues to share a name with the one Ye operated with Adidas (albeit, one now often stylized to eliminate the e’s), the Yeezy brand of today is a radical retail experiment that deviates from any of Ye’s past clothing projects.
Today there are no Yeezy fashion shows and no retail partnerships with Gap. Once known for his sensual color experimentations (people may downplay it now, but Ye’s earth-toned revolution did change fashion for a few years), Ye has retreated to a spartan palate. His clothes come in three colors: white, gray and black.
Every item, including a windbreaker shaped like a painter’s smock, shorts with an elastic waist and the slipper-shoes he introduced this week, sells for $20. Though Ye once jockeyed for attention on the runway, his designs now have more in common with Army surplus back-stock, or even prison uniforms than the fantastical creations coming out of Paris Fashion Week.
Still, Ye’s venture appears to be working — at least according to him. On Tuesday morning, Ye posted to Instagram that the shop had done more than $2.3 million in sales on Monday.
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