Ye Is Terminating His Partnership with Gap
It appears that the gap in their relationship was too wide to resolve.
At the top of the week, Ye revealed his plans to stop working with corporate partners after his deals with Gap and adidas expired in an interview with Bloomberg — but it appears he’s getting a head start on the proceedings. After months of increasingly dire complaints and ramblings on social media, Ye has formally notified Gap that he intends to terminate their partnership, per a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier today, Ye’s lawyers sent a letter to Gap notifying them that YEEZY LLC was ending the partnership because Gap was not releasing apparel or opening YEEZY retail stores as planned. No further collaborations will be created but Gap will still be able to sell existing YEEZY Gap products, and the termination of the agreement does not affect the merchandise Gap has made in partnership with Balenciaga.
First announced in 2020, the YEEZY and Gap partnership produced several colors of the famous “Round Jacket,” an assortment of slightly cropped hoodies, and, more recently, the YEEZY Gap Engineered by Balenciaga line which was debuted via pop-ups in July. More pieces are set to arrive in stores before the end of the year, but the fate of the YEEZY GAP SHDZ that Ye was recently promoting is unknown.
Ye’s signature bombastic tirades have been directed against against Gap — and adidas, with whom his deal runs until 2026 — recently. “If [these companies] want to play with me — I’ve been playing nice up to this point,” he said recently. His animosity seemingly reached a fever pitch last month when he posted a video of him speaking to Gap executives in which he mentioned “[Gap has] to really give me the position to be Ye and let me do what I’m thinking or I have to do the thinking somewhere else.” Shortly after, he announced plans to open standalone Yeezy stores. His contract with Gap calls for “as many as five” retail stores that would sell Yeezy Gap wares by July 31, 2023, none of which have opened yet.
For more from the wild world of Ye, check out his recent pick for the “best song in the history of music to date.”
