After his wife Kim Kardashian “broke the internet” with her Paper magazine cover shoot, Kanye West covers the magazine for its April 2015 issue. Not one to hold back on his point of view, West is featured along with his own words. Discussing the fashion industry once more and his recent collaboration with Adidas, West shares, “It’s beautiful when you can connect a purpose to things that you’ve spent a lot of time on. I feel very positive about the future. People are starting to recognize and just give me a chance to be looked at, respected and a part of the conversation. I really appreciate that my collection at New York Fashion Week was accepted positively. The moment that I saw Alber Elbaz, he patted me on the back and said, ‘Keep going.’ It’s important to believe and it’s equally important to pay your dues.”
West continues, trying to pinpoint his place in the fashion industry, “I was speaking at a fashion award ceremony–I gave the head of Milk Studios, Mazdack Rassi, the first award of the night–and I talked about the concept of ‘the fashion insider.’ I believe that everyone is a fashion insider, because it’s illegal to be naked. But in all seriousness, the fashion world can say, ‘Yo, you know what I mean: the inside insiders.’ I saw this article that asked, ‘Should Kanye leave fashion to the professionals?’ That question is really ignorant, in a way, because the second I sell my first T-shirt or my first shoe, doesn’t that make me a professional? And when you sit down with Riccardo Tisci at the Louvre and he pitches the idea of you wearing a leather kilt, which could be considered by all of your gangbanging friends as some sort of a dress or skirt, at that point you are now a part of the fashion world. You have paid your dues to be an insider. I paid my dues when I had to wear a kilt in Chicago, and friends would say, “What’s your boy got on?” But there are warriors that have killed people in kilts in the past. Who gets to decide what’s hard and what’s not hard? When I saw this kilt, I liked it. I was into it. It looked fresh to me. I felt creative; I didn’t feel limited by some perception.” Read more at PaperMag.com.