Kanye West and GQ's Jim Moore Go Deep on Fashion

Kanye: How long was it until you got your position?

Jim: It was very traditional in those days. You went from fashion assistant to associate fashion editor to fashion editor to senior fashion editor to all the way up. But it was a pretty rapid climb. I would say within about 18 months I was doing my own shoots, and within a couple of years I was a fashion editor, and creative director probably about 15 years later.

And your love of fashion came from family? Chicago? Ralph Lauren? Music?

I had an aunt that had Alzheimer's. She had Alzheimer's and she still showed up fresher than everybody else. She couldn't remember anything else, but her suit was so put together and tailored. So those types of things are in your DNA.

Kanye: Yes. My family, we have tailors, we have retailers. Is that how it got to retail, they've got a tailor and a person selling it? The re-tailor? My grandfather had a store and he would go to the flea market every Saturday and hustle. The store was like right behind his house. And when I went to my grandfather's funeral, it was more fire than fashion week, the way people, like, pulled up. I had kind of been displaced from all of my family—I was an only child living with my mother in Chicago. And I rediscovered fashion through the mall, like Girbauds and Chalk Line and Starter. And then I discovered, you know, Polo, going to see my dad and in Takoma Park, Maryland and people would be wearing, like, Polos with the Jordans. And then when I went out to L.A., stylists would tell me that I need to go to the shows. Like, What do you mean, ‘the shows?’ Like, the hell are the shows? “In Paris, the shows.” We would go to style.com, and they had the early Nicholas Ghesquiere Balenciaga collections on it, and the screen's like super, super small, and it would only be like, I don't know, 30 collections for the entire season. Then we actually started going out to the shows and rediscovered it in that way.

I'd meet with, say, Joseph Dirand, the interior designer and architect, and he was like, "Oh, my dad shot interiors when I was growing up." So you'd see that this guy Joseph Dirand had a head start on taste and sensibility. So it's like, where did Ye come from? How does this guy, just the cleanest guy we’ve ever seen in our life...? We talk about fashion—there was a lot of discrimination that we dealt with when we’d go to the shows like 10 years ago and everyone thought that, you know, fashion only came from Paris, when it came from right here in America [too]. And actually now, as you can see, America pretty much runs it, because we are leading the conversation of culture. So we can look deep into our roots.

I had an aunt that had Alzheimer's. She had Alzheimer's and she still showed up fresher than everybody else. She couldn't remember anything else, but her suit was so put together and tailored. So those types of things are in your DNA. It's not a marketing scheme. It's not a business opportunity. It is a life path and a life calling that we dedicate our life to imagery. To artistry. It's in our soul. This is a life calling. Anybody here, like if you haven't got your heart broken, you really don't even deserve to be in this room right now. Like, you know, you look at that price tag, and you save up for it, and you have enough to get it on layaway, and it's not at the store by the time you get there? And you have, like, "Whoa, this one's on sale and in my size?" moments, also.

People used to look at me as like, Oh, he's just this rapper when we would be out in Paris. But I've loved being in this community of people who appreciated the art, the suffering, the pain. You know, [Alexander] McQueen! When I was in the hospital, there were times where I'd wake up in the morning and I'd go to the office against all corporate odds just for McQueen. There would be days where I'd say, I'm doing this for McQueen right now. I am still living. Because he was killed by the corporations. [Ed. note: McQueen died by suicide in 2010.] And the artists and the spirit, the true people who grew up on texture, that had to get up out of a small town and go to a Company Limited to eventually become the creative director of GQ, are the leaders of the conversation. It’s not how quick something goes. It’s not how quick it can be copied. It’s not how much it can be doubled tripled, ten-xed on the stock market and what the market cap is. It's the people here who have had their hearts broken because their mama couldn't afford that jacket that they had to have. [The ones who] at that moment say, "We're going to dedicate our life to this."

So we'll always be in front of that jacket and be able to express it the way we put it together. And it don't stop until the casket drop. My grandpa—you go to a year before he died, he'd say, "That's a nice suit!" He’d say, "You've got good taste!"

Jim: Being a creative is something that, you know, you do until the day you die. If you're a plumber, you're looking for that moment to hang up your wrench. But I look at Stanley Kubrick and you know, Frank Lloyd Wright, and people who just do it until the end.

Kanye: Lagerfeld. Alaia.

Jim: Lagerfeld, exactly. And that's what keeps you going. So I really want to thank my, my incredibly dear friend. Super creative, incredible designer. Incredible artist. Jesus is King is spectacular. You guys, grab it.

Kanye: Speaking of Kubrick, they are doing some comparisons.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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