Kanye West Wants To Know If You’re Rocking Your Washed-Out Denim Bomber And Your Puffy Motorcycle Boots Yet

Style-maven, erstwhile inspirational preacher, general creator-around-the-known-universe and former Kardashian-spouse Kanye “Ye” West has been showing the motorcycle boots off for month or two. In fact, they could be read as space boots, or enlightened fakes thereof, but in the lexicon of astronaut-wear, Elon Musk’s boots for NASA are far skinnier, because, as every astronaut knows, legroom in the capsule atop a Falcon Heavy, or in any vehicle bound anywhere outside the stratosphere, is in short supply.

At any rate, whether the inspiration and message are from the motorcycle or the rocket booster, it would be fair to say that these boots — on such a figure as Mr. West, and strutted on January 23 loudly and proudly at such an occasion as the Paris Fashion Week shows — are making an official debut. Of sorts. As pictured above with his new flame, the actress Julia Fox, on January 23, West’s bearing of “statement” footwear to Paris approximates going Instagram-official in dating, which he did with Ms. Fox earlier this month, at New Year’s. Seen in that light, as a registered certified fashionista and occasional designer, Kanye West can be said to “date” his clothes in the sense of then, also, ditching them for a new look after an appropriate interregnum in what passes for love in fashion.

It’s also fair to say that Mr. West’s well-reported New Year’s hook-up and subsequent swift “style-twinning” with the formidably fashion-forward actress Julia Fox is part of what we can call his breakup semaphore. This newly-self-re-christened Ye will always strive to be more fabulous that we mere mortals, is the first message, and the corrolary message is that that group — mere mortals — now includes his notorious former wife.

In fairness, Mr. West has been a fan of heavy boots for some time, pictured above a few short pre-Julia-Fox weeks back in a muscular pair of mud-wellies at the Los Angeles Mission’s 2021 Thanksgiving event. Big robust mud boots do bring a kind of well-grounded, ready-for-anything feel — duck hunting in Arkansas, peat-harvesting in Scotland, elk-butchering in Montana, what have you — and that can be mightily reassuring in the worlds of business and romance as volatile as Mr. West’s clearly are. Metaphorically speaking, these are his seven-league boots, his base. The noble, charitable Los Angeles Mission Thanksgiving event is anything but Paris Fashion Week, but the new “Ye” message here is a similar one: Mr. West is moving on, and he’s excellently prepared for heavy ground.

In the timeline of Mr. West’s most eventful life in business and romance over the last three years, it’s difficult to say whether his “going to the mountain” of his Wyoming retreats since his purchase of his two ranches near Cody, Wyoming, in 2019 has brought him to the messianic pinnacles toward which he seems to strive. Certainly, the weekly religious services at one of the Wyoming properties; the 2018 “listening party” album debut around a ranch bonfire (for the eponymous album Ye); and the erratic 2020 presidential “campaign” that was then as mysteriously but mercifully put down — which retreat was engineered from his Wyoming stronghold — all indicate a gargantuan level of self-belief. Allegations of his mental hurdles aside, in the always-surprising world of “Ye,” this belief translates fairly directly to his (huge) fan base, which is to say, it earns a ton of money. Along the way, the fashionable musician reportedly sold $500,000 in “Wyoming” sweats and tees in the first hours that he put them up on his website. Who knew?

Certain is, in West’s enormous marketing embrace, the name of the state only mattered because “Ye” actually does operate from there. Were his ranches a few hundred miles to the southwest, it could have as easily been a cool half-million dollars in tees and hoodies from “Utah.”

The takeaway? If you’re mulling a play in footwear, watch what Kanye West has on his feet.