Kanye West will soon unveil the newest iteration of Yeezy Supply, the website that features his collection of shoes, clothes, and accessories. When it debuts, you can expect a shopping experience unlike anything you’ve seen on the internet.
You’ll be able to pick an outfit, then put it on a 3D model who walks across the screen. And if you want to know more about that model, you can click to get a few background details, like her favorite food, or a significant life experience she has had. There are no words on the screen. The overall aesthetic is as if a video game were set in a medical supply store. In a good way.
Knight, who is a well-known fashion photographer and filmmaker, created a short film that documents the entire three-year-long journey the pair went on to create the new site. Part of their process was completely counterintuitive: They came up with a list of things they didn’t like and that weren’t considered to be “good taste,” then used that as a foundation for an online shopping experience.
For instance, the pair dug through some of the most low-fi, functional e-commerce sites on the internet. On the website for an off-brand medical supply company, West became fixated with an image of three scrubs next to a mannequin on a blue background (West famously hates the color blue). This became the inspiration for early iterations of the Yeezy Supply website. “He had had enough of working with things that he loved and wanted to try a different way of creating,” Knight says in the film.
It’s classic contrarian Kanye. But it’s also where online shopping is headed. Most shopping sites are generic. From Barney’s to Staples, brands use the same infrastructure that first became popular in the ’90s, forcing consumers to scroll through rows of products and filter items using navigation tools. Companies have tried to stand out through punchy graphics and bright color palettes, but there hasn’t been much structural innovation, beyond a few experiments here and there. Yeezy Supply is the latest thought experiment to ask what happens when you break all the rules about what constitutes a functional, well-designed website.
Does the site ask too much of visitors? Will they be so distracted, they forget to buy anything? Maybe. But ultimately, West and Knight aspired to make more than a website: They wanted to turn shopping into a form of art. “Humans have created art in every medium we have encountered, but we have yet to see an art form emerge from the internet,” Knight asks. “Why shouldn’t the great art of the internet emerge from an e-commerce website?”