It all began earlier this summer when Kanye called out Adidas over their Adilette 22 slides, which he was convinced were a direct imitation of the YEEZY Slides (both seen below).
Bare in mind that YEEZY is manufactured by Adidas and that Kanye doesn’t design the shoes himself. YEEZY has an entire footwear design team and this doesn’t include the Adidas team members who oversee distribution, fabrication, and materials.
Not long after Kanye uploaded the Instagram posts making these accusations, they were soon swiftly deleted.
Adidas responded by denying any imitation attempts between the two different slide sandals, but they mostly kept quiet during all the noise made by Kanye.
It wasn’t until the annual YEEZY DAY during early August 2022, when Kanye took to Instagram again to claim that YEEZY DAY 2022 occurred without his knowledge and that Adidas was dropping a series of YEEZY shoes he didn’t approve of.
A handful of deleted posts later, once again, Kanye returned to Instagram in late August to begin another rant and series of accusations.
Alongside a series of assertions about Kanye’s opinions on Adidas‘ unfair practices, he also claimed that a physical YEEZY store called “YZYSPLY,” is to be built in Atlanta.
The drama began a new chapter on September 2 when in a series of quickly uploaded and then deleted Instagram posts, Kanye indirectly called out Adidas executives and specifically began mocking Adidas SVP, Daniel Cherry III.
Some shocking posts were later uploaded by Ye when he posted a screenshot of San Antonio Shoemakers (SAS), possibly suggesting or threating to switch footwear productions from Adidas to SAS?
Kanye also claimed that Adidas offered him $1 billion as a buyout for the YEEZY brand, which has supposedly already made Ye a billionaire.
After a long day of what felt like a one sided argument, Ye some how declared his victory over Adidas.
Kanye never fully explained what happened or why or what he or anyone else gained from the lengthy outburst but he considered it a success and claimed that GAP were next.
We could see from a screenshot that was uploaded on Kanye’s Instagram page, Kanye’s legal team actually urged him to “refrain from posting anything on GAP for another 10 days.”
Ignoring this in true Kanye fashion, Kanye called out GAP over several issues. He complained that GAP were taking meetings about Ye and without including him in them.
Kanye also appears to believe that just like Adidas, GAP is “imitating” the YEEZY GAP Engineered by Balenciaga aesthetic in its mainline collection.
To summarise: YEEZY is still produced by Adidas and YEEZY GAP is still produced by GAP, even the Balenciaga collaboration.
There are rumours circulating online that the new YEEZY Instagram account has no affiliation with Adidas, and that it may be one of Ye’s ploys to try and scare Adidas into believing Kanye really might take YEEZY away from Adidas and start its own thing.
Diddy took to Instagram to defend Kanye against Adidas, claiming the brand have made billions from their culture with giving little back. American record producer Swizz Beats also came to Kanye’s aid and claimed “If we let them do this to Kanye it will happen to us also!”
It’s still not clear why Kanye is so agitated by Adidas, I refuse to believe it’s all because the Adidas Slides and YEEZY slides share a slight similarity.
As a spectator, It’ll be interesting to see if Adidas and YEEZY decide to part ways or if they’ll attempt to go back to the way things were.
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