Obama joked about Ye’s 2020 run. Then Kim posted his two pairs of Yeezys

Two shoe boxes sit stacked in front of an oval window, a yellow Post-it stuck to the end of each. There’s one word on both: “Obama”. Kim Kardashian West posted the photo on 10 Oct 2015 with a two-word caption, “Special delivery”, and one hashtag, #yeezys. Hypebeast, Complex and E! all had it up the same day.

The labels do the rest. The top box is a Yeezy Boost 350 in Pirate Black, size 11½. Under it sits the Yeezy 750 Boost in its original light brown, size 12, and Footwear News read the same two sizes off the labels. It’s as close as the record gets to a sitting US president in Yeezys. Six years earlier Obama had called Ye a “jackass”, NBC Bay Area recalled. Now Ye was the headline act at his fundraiser.

A punchline at the Warfield

That morning Obama spoke at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at the Warfield in San Francisco, with about 1,300 people in the theatre, KTVU reported. He talked for under half an hour, on guns, immigration and the economy, and saved a bit for the man playing after him. Ye had said he’d run for president in 2020. So Obama put a question to the room, KTVU and E! reported. Was the country really going to “elect a black guy from the South Side of Chicago with a funny name to be President”?

Ye went on once the president had left for Los Angeles. Kim and North sat in the front row for Love Lockdown, Runaway, All Falls Down and Good Life, San Francisco State’s Golden Gate Xpress reported. KTVU said he’d posed for photos with Obama, Kim and North, though the two didn’t share the stage.

#44 and #46

Kim had one more post that weekend, and Footwear News ran it next to the boxes. Two signatures in black marker on a painted wall: Obama’s with “#44” under it, Ye’s with “#46 2020”.

Neither pair was new by October. They’re both from Ye’s first year with adidas. The 750 was the first adidas Yeezy of all, launched through reservations in New York on 14 Feb 2015, and BET put that first run at 9,000 pairs. The Pirate Black 350 followed on 22 Aug 2015, the week Bloomberg photographed shoppers camped outside Foot Locker on London’s Oxford Street for it.

Footwear News figured Obama wouldn’t wear them to anything official and guessed he’d save them for the family’s Hawaii holiday. Eleven years on, the Post-its are still the only proof the pairs were his.