Kanye West covers the most recent edition of T Magazine, which serves as the NY Times style component. With photography handled by Juergen Teller, Kanye takes things to the graveyard for this dark yet vibrant look into his personal world of style — which focuses almost totally on his new Yeezy Season 1 line with adidas. In the written piece, Jon Caramanica gets some good quotables and insight into the current inner-workings of Kanye, his businesses, fashion and married life. This is grown man B.I.
He claims he’s trying harder to let things go. When Beck beat out Beyoncé for Best Album at the Grammys in February, West walked on stage in a near-farcical echo of what he’d done to Taylor Swift, but then thought better of it and returned to his seat. (He later apologized to Beck on Twitter.) And adversaries are being greeted with warmth, which may actually be shrewdness. On Twitter, he invited Fern Mallis to meet: “If you wanna have a drink with me, book a table at the spotted pig when I’m back in NY.” More recently, after publicly chiding Bernard Arnault, LVMH Chairman and C.E.O., for refusing to take a meeting with him, West arranged a series of impromptu concerts through Arnault’s 22-year-old son, Alexandre, and performed them at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The elder Arnault attended the first concert, later congratulating West backstage. (He got his meeting.)
West’s newly mellowed self is also beginning to come through in his music. Following the raw scrape of industrial noise-rap that was the “Yeezus” album, there was “Only One,” a tender number sung from the perspective of his late mother, Donda (who died unexpectedly in 2007) and recorded with Paul McCartney. Then came “FourFiveSeconds,” a stripped-down folk song with Rihanna and McCartney.
“I have this table in my new house,” West said, offering a parable. “They put this table in without asking. It was some weird nouveau riche marble table, and I hated it. But it was literally so heavy that it took a crane to move it. We would try to set up different things around it, but it never really worked.
“I realized that table was my ego. No matter what you put around it, under it, no matter who photographed it, the douchebaggery would always come through.”
Check out more pics below, and read the full piece here.