Confessions on Kanye West
Troubling, inspiring, maddening, audacious, outrageous… TC & Friends’ Managing Director, Zulum Elumogo, reflects on the impact of Kanye West
Kanye West in Wallpaper*, February 2009
Few artists have changed the direction of culture. Kanye is one of them. Despite his most recent apology, that sentence has become harder to say. But it remains true.
Amid the mindless outbursts, meltdowns and ugliness, there is the work – and it reshaped music, fashion and design for a generation. I remember the exact moment it shaped me.
In February 2016, I tuned into a grainy livestream from Madison Square Garden on Tidal to watch Kanye West debut new music and a fashion collection. I was in my second year at the London School of Economics. I should have been revising.
Instead, I was glued to my laptop because I’d heard Chance the Rapper might feature on the opening track. He did. The song was Ultralight Beam – a gospel-rap anthem that still feels transcendent today.
But what stayed with me wasn’t just the music. It was the fact that twenty thousand people in the world’s most famous arena gathered for a fashion show. It was the masses of multiracial models wearing his latest designs. It was the multiple layers of theatre, sound, set design and celebrity folding into one another – and then Kanye playing an unfinished album off a laptop through an aux cord. It was high and low culture colliding – spectacle and improvisation at once.
Twenty-two-year-old me didn’t have the vocabulary for it yet, but I was watching interdisciplinary design at scale. Kanye was world-building, and I felt compelled to learn more.
Later that year, Kanye toured the United States on a floating stage that hovered above the crowd like a spaceship. Fans weren’t just spectators; they were the show.
Kanye West performing on the 2016 Saint Pablo Tour
Designed in collaboration with Es Devlin, the stage became my accidental education in spatial storytelling – how light, architecture and movement could shape emotion as powerfully as sound.
That tour was a portal. It made the world of design feel tangible – the creative industries within reach, not distant.
Indeed, when Tony Chambers and I first met in 2020, I was intrigued that he’d met and worked with Kanye during Tony’s time as editor-in-chief of Wallpaper* magazine. Kanye was a judge of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2009 and Tony remembered him as culturally ravenous yet astute – endlessly curious and in love with creativity.
From left: The late Yves Carcelle, former CEO of Louis Vuitton, Tony Chambers, Kanye West, Rebecca Carcelle and luxury brands advisor Stéphane Gerschel
Along with the work of the late, great Virgil Abloh, I related to their creative references and vernacular. I understood their aesthetic choices and direction. Ego and megalomania aside, Kanye’s creative output was in many ways my entry point into the world of design. His frenzied knack for collaboration and his refusal to stay in one discipline showed me that creativity didn’t need to have borders.
His expansiveness felt liberating, and his impact is evident: in the growth of emotionally articulate hip-hop, the convergence of streetwear and luxury, and concerts that feel more like performance art than popular recitals.
But creative prowess, in Kanye’s case, has always come with negative excess.
What once felt like radical honesty and vulnerability has curdled into something much darker. His disgraceful antisemitic rhetoric, his conspiracy peddling and public cruelty, guised as candour, have all overshadowed his creativity in recent years.
It’s been heartbreaking to watch him unravel and become so damaging and destructive. There’s no excuse for it – but pretending his artistry hasn’t been impactful would also be dishonest.
Whilst it was good to see Kanye’s recent apology ad in the Wall Street Journal, it’s isn’t enough to absolve him. He needs to walk the walk and work to restore trust with those he’s harmed.
His catalogue still shapes culture. The creative industries are exciting precisely because of innovators like Kanye who keep pushing boundaries.
We can credit the craft without excusing the damage. As I write this, Kanye is back on tour with a new album on the way. Let’s hope he can change, heal the hurt and become a positive and inspiring creative force once again.
Zulum Elumogo, Managing Director of TC & Friends
