Despite His Best Efforts, Kanye West's Outsized Influence on Modern Menswear Persists

Welcome to HOF Fits, a series that pays homage to the perennial MVPs of the competitive sport that is getting dressed.

It's not in Kanye West's nature to rest on his laurels. Fresh off the heels of signing a multiyear deal with Gap—a dramatic realization of a long-held dream to bring his designs to the masses—the pioneering creative polyglot dropped a new single featuring Travis Scott, his first release since 2019's Jesus Is King. Say what you will about the man, but his work ethic has always been unimpeachable. His drive is famously relentless. (Sometimes a bit too relentless: see his recently announced presidential bid, of the extremely ill-advised variety, for further proof.) So it's little surprise that while he was dropping genre-defining albums and gradually building a billion-dollar sneaker business, he was able to maintain a side hustle as the most influential figure in modern menswear, full stop.

For a period of time starting in the early 2010s, whatever Kanye wore was sacrosanct—his outfits downloaded and saved into thousands of desktop folders around the world, to be dissected in detail by hordes of frenzied followers—and over the last decade his sway has only slightly abated. (If you're a fashion-forward dude and curious about the origins of any given item in your closet, chances are Kanye had a hand in popularizing some version of it, more often than not a few years before the style hit the mainstream.) So sure, it's easy to write off some of Kanye's more out-there claims as typically second-to-none displays of pure braggadocio, but when it comes to the role he's played in shaping the look of modern menswear, it really is hard to overstate his influence.

Today, with so many of his closest collaborators now comfortably ensconced in the fashion firmament, West's influence might be less visible but remains no less prevalent. Thankfully for us, the primary perk of being one of the most famous people in the world is that there's always someone around to document your fits (even, unfortunately, when you don't want 'em to). And in Kanye's case that means a veritable treasure trove of photo evidence testifying to his influence, via image after image—after image—of his every internet-shattering outfit.

And if you've been feeling conflicted about his recent turn as a born-again Republican billionaire (with the outlandish opinions to back it up) there's some comfort to be had in tuning out the noise and focusing on the man's many, many memorable fits. Because no matter what Ye decides to do next, we'll always have his outfits, and now seems a particularly apt time to look back at some of his best.

It's Yeezy season, baby. Let's get it.