Kanye West was booked and busy in New York this past week. While presumably in town to support his ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s hosting gig on Saturday Night Live, he also found time for some serious kaffeeklatsching, meeting up with both former Trump associate Michael Cohen at the Sant Ambroeus uptown, and with Vogue editor Anna Wintour at the Sant Ambroeus in the West Village. A busy weekend for Ye requires some heavy-duty footwear—like, say, a pair of platform Crocs.
The pair Kanye’s been wearing appear to be the clompy rubber Croc boots from Balenciaga’s freaky-deaky spring 2022 collection—no surprise here, as Kanye and Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia have been like this🤞 lately. This feels like a seasonally appropriate swap for Ye’s own Croc-adjacent, space-age-y Yeezy Foam Runners, and it may be only a matter of time before he steps out in a pair of the house’s newest Crocs iteration: a hardware-heavy slingback with an even higher platform, as modeled by both Elliot Page and Lewis Hamilton on Balenciaga’s red carpet runway last week.
Kanye wearing Crocs (if, of course, that's what he's wearing) falls smack in the cross section of two major moments here: the wider Crocs renaissance, and Kanye and Kim’s deeper-still foray into the Demnaverse. (You could also call that Demna’s foray into the Kimyeverse, though it feels more symbiotic than that.) Kim, who has been wearing Balenciaga almost exclusively for the past month or so—including at the Met Gala and throughout her week of SNL rehearsals and appearances—has become the designer’s muse (a role she’s long filled for Kanye), an ideal poster girl for the house’s current era of pop populism. Same goes for Kanye, though he also declined to share the price of his Balenciaga wares—including the bag he’s been wearing around his neck like a passport holder—when social media personality Chris Smoove, known for his “How much does your fit cost?” videos, asked him this past weekend. Whether or not he’s actually been buying all of his Balenciaga seems neither here nor there, though he’s definitely shelling out for some of it, as evidenced by his apparent cleaning out of Dover Street Market’s entire stock back in August. When you love something—including Crocs—you can never have enough.