A first-look at the new Yeezy Supply website

A few days after the announcement of the collaboration with Gap, Kanye West has revealed that he has designed a new Yeezy Supply website in which he wants to turn online shopping into an artistic experience. The new version of the site, three-dimensional and interactive, was created in collaboration with Nick Knight, filmmaker and fashion photographer who will also take care of the creative direction of the Valentino Haute Couture digital show.

Knight personally announced the project in a short film, explaining that their goal was not only to design a new website, but rather to transform the virtual shopping experience into a real art form. The new platform, on which the Yeezy line items will be available, is currently inaccessible, but should be online in the next few days and promises to be something never seen before on the Internet.

According to what one can see in the video, more than an e-shop, the new Yeezy Supply looks like a video game: the clothes and all the items will be displayed in a sort of floating galaxy that will allow users to buy with a few clicks, but there it will also be a "waiting room" for the release of each new pair of shoes. For the occasion, West even chose to use blue, a color that he famously hate.

The most striking detail, though, is that the shopping experience will become three-dimensional: after selecting the outfits, in fact, it will be possible to see them worn by 3D models, real avatars that will walk on the screen. Furthermore, the experience goes much deeper. All the models, representing bodies of different sizes and colors, will have a story: they will be nurses, firefighters, teachers in a public school and their life will be a fundamental point of the new shopping experience. "We were trying to make the internet a more humane place," explained Nick Knight; "We've gotten used to the internet being a flat, two-dimensional place. But the internet is also this amazing tool that connects everybody in the world: What if we could use it to get to know the people we are looking at on the screen?"

The new site takes distances from traditional fashion e-shop platforms, and it is rather inspired by other more functional online shopping sites, such as those of medical supplies. For Knight, most of the e-shops suffer from two extreme defects: either they are too complex and discourage the user after a few attempts, or on the contrary they are too simple and do not give confidence for the most significant purchases (think of Amazon, which lately has been moving more and more towards the luxury market). According to what Knight says, most e-shops are generic, impersonal and still use the same interface that became popular in the Nineties, which forces users to scroll all products from top to bottom, making the most of some navigation filters. On the contrary, the goal of Kanye, who has never hidden the dream of a more democratic fashion, is innovation: an innovation that is accessible to everyone, even in the interface of an online shopping site.

The impact that this project could have on the entire fashion industry is still unclear. Maybe it will ask too much commitment and attention to its users, who are already accustomed to a much less interactive shopping experience? As nss magazine pointed out in its Digital Cover N03, the tastes and consumption of Generation Z are pushing the entire fashion industry to re-imagine the future and also to change the way in which to communicate and sell products. Similarly, the figure of creators (such as Kanye, Travis Scott, Kylie Jenner) has become a fundamental part of the fashion world. Starting from these assumptions, the design of the new Yeezy Supply new website moves precisely in this direction. “Humans have created art in every medium we have encountered, but we have yet to see an art form emerge from the internet,” continues Knight; "Why shouldn't the great art of the internet emerge from an e-commerce website?"