Back in February, Ye showed off the first drop of his Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga collection—an offshoot of his Gap line created in collaboration with Balenciaga creative director Demna. The marketing fell in line with Demna’s foreboding fashion, modeled by black-morph-suit-wearing, not-quite-sentient mannequins.
Now the trio is back for a second round of creative exploration, and their latest campaign is relatively heartfelt. It takes the form of a new music video-slash-television commercial for the track “Life Of The Party” off of Ye’s deluxe album Donda 2—a fan-favorite song featuring André 3000 that Ye initially left off the original Donda EP. (An unfinished snippet had been floating around the internet after Ye’s frenemy Drake leaked it back in September.) The video, which premiered last night, features a series of photos from Ye’s childhood digitally altered retrofit him into pint-sized Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga duds. This has the effect, intentional or inadvertent, of making the digitized young Ye look a lot like his own children—who, like both of their parents, often wear head-to-toe Balenciaga. In the song, Ye and André both speak directly to Ye’s late mother Donda West, for whom his album is named, making it especially poignant for him to release the music video yesterday on Mother’s Day.
A 30-second version of the video aired as a commercial on Fox during last night’s episode of Family Guy, which has featured several unofficial Ye guest appearances over the years. (For what it’s worth, Ye has said that his favorite show is Rick and Morty.) Meanwhile, the video also happened to drop the same day as another eerie deepfake music video: Kendrick Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5,” in which the rapper’s face CGI-morphs into the faces of other famous Black men including Kobe Bryant, Will Smith, Nipsey Hussle, and…Ye himself.
Oh, right, the clothes: based on the video, we can the next round of Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga to include a black sweatshirt and puffer shell similar to the blockbuster hoodie and “round jacket” from Ye’s solo collab with Gap, as well as a quarter-zip shell with a Gap-branded front pocket, which Ye wore recently. The new collection will be available for purchase on the Yeezy Gap website, as well as the luxury e-comm platforms Farfetch, Mytheresa, and Luisa Via Roma, starting May 25.
