On June 1st, a man FaceTiming with a phone propped in front of his face walked with four friends into Victor Outdoor Seconds, a vintage shop in Victor, Idaho. He brushed by the shop’s owner, Jennifer Bandow, and said to his friend, “I’m going to buy a lot of stuff.” He then started pulling items by the dozen off the rack and tossing them into three different piles. “I bet this doesn’t happen everyday,” one of the guy’s buddies said to her. You’d be surprised, Bandow thought, we get all sorts of crazy people who make piles in here. But Bandow perked up hearing bits of the man’s conversation: “Drake,” “album cover.” She asked one of the man’s buddies if they were a band, playing here in Victor. They laughed. Finally, about twenty minutes into the man’s half-hour visit she asked who it was. “It’s Kanye West,” the friend said, “and keep it on the down low.”
Victor, Idaho, a town of 2,055 people, isn’t exactly where you’d expect one of the most famous and best-dressed people in the world to go on a shopping spree. Then again Jackson Hole, Wyoming is also an odd spot to record five albums back to back to back to back to back. Of course, this is Kanye West we’re talking about, and Kanye’s career—for better and worse—is built on shirking expectations. In a new comprehensive interview with The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica, Kanye talks about his comments regarding Donald Trump and slavery, his relationship with Louis Vuitton designer Virgil Abloh, and, naturally, shopping.
The interview spanned several days, and followed a few of Kanye’s whims: he walked two miles to the nearest movie theater to see see Solo: A Star Wars Story, conversing with every fan on the way, and stopped in at a tiny secondhand shop named Victors Outdoor Seconds. It’s an 1,100-square-foot wooden shack of a shop that neighbors a Phillips 66 gas station, and is filled with the sort of apparel you’d buy before a last-minute ski trip: coats, skis leaning against the walls, and boots lined up on the ground.
Just like Kanye can find the cover of his latest album in the scenery en route to the record’s listening party, he can discover inspiration for his line at a small vintage store. Kanye’s Yeezy line is greatly indebted to the colors and silhouettes of classic workwear—so he wasn’t going to waste his time in Victors Outdoor Seconds. Bandow says over those three piles Kanye accumulated about 100 items at an average of $35 per piece.
In the process, he wiped out an entire men’s jacket rack, but also bought some cycling jerseys and shorts, wetsuits, and a few pairs of running shoes by the brand Hoka. He also sent a woman on a mad dash to grab her grandson for a photo, but by the time they got back to the store Kanye had already left. He ended up buying 13 trash bags stuffed full of apparel and the image of the clustered bags, from June 1st, is still the last picture posted to Victors Outdoor Seconds Facebook page. “Thank you Kanye West for supporting my store,” the caption reads. “Biggest sale EVER!!!!” Bandow says her only conversation with Kanye involved the logistics of the sale: his assistant paid for the clothes and came by to pick them up the next day.
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Kanye’s appreciation for this sort of functional apparel is well documented. Earlier this year, in the sweltering Calabasas heat, Kanye would walk from his car to the Yeezy design studio in a puffed up North Face jacket. A couple years back he put hyper-technical Canadian outdoor brand Arc'teryx on the map for hypebeasts everywhere when he wore the brand on a ski trip. They’re the sort of clothes you can see in Yeezy’s muddled green and brown jackets, beat-up parkas, and fleece quarter-zips—“Mr. Abloh complimented Kanye’s facility with earth tones,” Caramanica wrote of a phone call between the two. The biggest difference is Yeezy’s four-digit price tags.
Bandow, who describes herself as a Christian music fan, says she isn’t much a fan of Kanye’s music, save for his song “Stronger.” But after Kanye left, she realized what a big deal it was to have him in her modest store. Other celebrities, like Laurie Metcalf and Eric Olsen, from the show NCIS: Los Angeles, have stopped by in the past. “After he left it really hit me, the importance of it,” she says. “He's not just a Laurie Metcalf, he's someone that is on the front and center of all the news. It just hit me how important that time was that he was in my store—he's not just a celebrity.”