Kanye West last night was awareded the Footwear News magazine award for “Shoe of the Year” for his Yeezy Boost 350 sneaker, designed in collaboration with Adidas Originals. Guests were treated to a 20 minute acceptance speech by West in which he discussed a variety of topics, ranging from his award show run in with Taylor Swift leading to his first ideas about the shoe, why he attends fashion shows plus his desire to bring joy. He also credited Adidas, especially the brand’s global director of entertainment and influencer marketing, John Wexler, for giving him the creative freedom to create a shoe without restrictions, implying that Nike was more dictatorial about design direction. Below are some of the quotes from the speech.
“As a creator, it doesn’t matter how big your house is, how big your name is, how much money you have, your job is to create while you’re here and if anyone is in the way of that, if anything gets in the way of that, you got to burn it to the fucking ground.”
“I want to fucking draw shoes, and it doesn’t matter if someone thinks that I’m supposed to be doing something that’s more important. [Adidas] gave me the opportunity, especially this first run, to make ’em however I want to make ’em. They didn’t say, “You got to make the logo four times bigger than the shoe.’”
“The [Adidas] contract said 25 SKUs, and the fashion show I was supposed to do a collection with 25 SKUs — I don’t know how that was supposed to happen. And the original talent budget was $500,000 — I don’t know how I was supposed to put a design team together for that, but luckily I’m a multi-millionaire rapper and I covered the rest of it.”
Find more quotes and coverage of the event at Footwear News and watch the full speech below.