Ye, Nick Knight, and Candice Swanepoel on Creating the Newest YZY Campaign

Ye’s newest sunglasses have the rapper and designer’s daughter’s seal of approval. “I put these glasses on Chicago last night and she was like ‘these are my glasses now,’ she didn’t want to take them off,” says Ye, speaking over the phone. It seems to mean a lot to him that she’s able to appreciate the YZY SHDZ. “She was able to throw shades in the air and they fell on the ground, and I wasn’t running like ‘you’re going to break the prototype.’”

The style has been making rounds on social media—and were notably worn by Kim Kardashian and North West. Ye designed them with creative involvement from Balenciaga’s similarly mononymous designer Demna. “Both Virgil [Abloh] and Demna worked on Yeezy season one, and now with losing Virgil, I wasn’t able to work with him when he was at Louis Vuitton, so that’s why I think it’s so important that me and Demna still get to work together. We collectively present new ideas for our species, you know?” 

That new idea was realized in campaign photos by frequent Ye collaborator Nick Knight. Here, Candice Swanepoel is pictured with a bald head wearing the silver shades connected in the back by a cord, and nothing else. Ye and Swanepoel recently flew to London to shoot with Knight (the bald head is actually Knight’s, not Swanepoel’s—they photoshopped his head in). 

“I can send them out to any modeling agency now and be employed for the top of my head only,” Knight says. Since the two have worked together on many projects including the short film Jesus Is King, music video “24,” and the YZY SPLY website, Knight and Ye have built a rapport. “Unlike virtually any other person I’ve worked with, he very much wants to make sure he sees what he wants to see. Not in a nasty way at all; it’s very inspiring to work with someone who cares that much about how the imagery should work,” Knight says. (For this image, Knight says they went back and forth to find the perfect shade of gray-blue). Ye had wanted to work with Swanepoel since spotting her at a party 12 years ago, and Knight describes her as, “one of those models who just wants to get a great image and will work to do so.” The feeling is mutual, as Swanepoel says, “the vision for the shoot was so clear, but also allowed for me to contribute my perspective on it. Moreover, it was exciting being a part of something I knew would instantly become iconic.”

They can make anyone—be it Lil Uzi Vert or Lisa Rinna—look like they’ve landed from the year 3022. Ye himself appears to have mixed feelings about the term “futuristic,” though. “Saying something is in the future takes out the accountability of it needing to exist in our reality and the fact that it’s 2022, and we don’t have the future we thought we were going to have,” he says. “Certain things are more futuristic, and a lot of things are less futuristic than we thought we would have. Obviously, I’ve been defined as a futurist. I’ll put this like this, it’s going to rhyme, it’s going to be poetry: Since we’ve been defined as futurists, we will define what the future is.”