After months of recrimination on social media, and in his typically bombastic cadence, Kanye West has announced he will be terminating his partnership with American high street retailer Gap to produce Yeezy co-branded apparel and accessories. The ignoble conclusion to an alignment previously projected to net Gap US$1 billion in sales, it comes hot on the heels of Ye’s ongoing beef with Adidas – another corporate partner who the award-winning rapper and fashion designer has repeatedly accused of cannibalising his designs.
Legal documents made public this Thursday contend that Gap management had “abandoned its contractual obligations” and that, consequently, there were sufficient grounds upon which to terminate the ongoing Yeezy Gap initiative. Mark Breitbard, CEO and President of the Gap brand, has also confirmed the company’s intention to part ways with Ye – in an internal memo earlier circulated among employees.
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“We are deciding to wind down the partnership while we share a vision of bringing high-quality, trend-forward, utilitarian design to all people… how we work together to deliver this vision is not aligned,” said Breitbard.
Elsewhere, Ye revealed he wasn’t able to set the prices on YEEZY x Gap items, expressing an initial desire to make pieces available at just $20. Currently, the YEEZY x Gap collection ranges from $60 to more than $300 on the retailer’s site.
“Sometimes I would talk to the guys, the leaders, and it would be like I was on mute or something,” Ye revealed to CNBC.
The split has had a cooling effect on Gap’s market performance, with shares down 3.6% when New York opened for trading on Thursday. Under the terms of the YEEZY Gap agreement, Gap will remain able to continue selling the collaboration’s existing products – through to Q2 of 2023. Crucially, that includes multiple releases slated for Fall/Winter and the holidays.
Culture junkies can expect Ye to take to social media imminently for a self-declared victory lap: along with the capitulation of his long-term deal to make co-branded Adidas sneakers, the defunct Yeezy GAP partnership releases Ye from a previous 10-year agreement, set to expire in 2030.
“It’s time for me to go it alone,” he said in a recent interview with Bloomberg.
“No more companies in-between me and the audience.”
