Kanye fires thieving designer from the Yeezy team

Kanye throws down the hammer — apparently.

What else can you say about Kanye’s week? It’s had everything, from calling slavery a choice, throwing his entire weight into his support for the current POTUS, to stealing designs for his Yeezy brand.

The latter, at least, might not be entirely his fault.

Earlier this week, Tony Spackman, a former Nike designer — now design director at Givenchy — called out Ye for an apparent Yeezy design sketch, which turned out to be stolen from his Cargo Collective website.

“When Kanye rips your 10 year old sketch and claims it,” Spackman wrote, before later clarifying that the sketch was actually 13 years old.

Ever-controversial Kanye is no stranger to digging in the far reaches of the internet for inspiration. Is Ye just showing his creative process with inspiration images or claiming the work to be his own? Photoshopping out the title of the sketch in the top left corner is pretty much a dead giveaway lol. The original by designer @tonyspackman was done in 2005 for a @nike collection called “Living Apparel” which eventually became “Nike React”, a running collection grounded in freedom of movement and human comfort. Can we just call it Yee?y now? ? • #yeezy #kanyewest #kanye #kimye #theft #inspiration #illustration #design #fashiondesign #sportswear #streetwear #athleisure #nike #streetstyle #running #nikerunning #hypebeast #highsnobiety #snobshots #wiwt #ootd #copycat #knockoff #wtf #dietprada

A post shared by Diet Prada ™ (@diet_prada) on May 3, 2018 at 6:19am PDT

Of course, after the week of L’s Kanye has taken, he wasn’t taking on another one. With swift action, he passed the blame on to a ‘new employee’ to the design team, that has since got the axe. A follow-up tweet shows that Ye gave credit where credit was due, labelling Spackman as the “true creator of this amazing work.”

Today I learned that a newly hired designer on the Yeezy team presented work that was not of their own. This person has immediately been let go from the Yeezy brand.



— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) May 4, 2018

In a moment of inspiration, energy and excitement I had posted this sketch and would like to acknowledge the true creator of this amazing work, Tony Spackman.



— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) May 4, 2018

But the firing of the design thief is a little ironic, because West has recently tweeted in favor of “taking ideas,” claiming that all great artists “take and update.” He even went as far as saying that it’s “important that ideas see the light of day even if you don’t get the credit for them.”

In these instances though, it seems what Kanye says and what Kanye does is often not the same thing.

Like we didn’t know that already.

too much emphasis is put on originality. Feel free to take ideas and update them at your will all great artist take and update.



— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 18, 2018

let’s be less concerned with ownership of ideas. It is important that ideas see the light of day even if you don’t get the credit for them. Let’s be less concerned with credit awards and external validation.



— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 18, 2018