Ye wore the Zebra six months early, and Hypebeast guessed it was a 550

Ye walked through Midtown Manhattan on 29 Aug 2016 in grey on grey: an oversized crewneck, grey jeans, Kim Kardashian at his side. Raymond Hall caught it for GC Images, and the part that mattered wasn’t the grey. It was at the bottom of the frame. His Yeezy Boosts were a white and black knit, striped like an animal, with SPLY-350 running down the side in red.

Nobody had seen that shoe before. It wouldn’t have a style code or a release date for another six months, so the first people to write about it had to guess.

Hypebeast’s guess: 550s

Hypebeast ran the photos on 31 Aug 2016 and floated a name: 550s. It placed the sighting outside Madison Square Garden, after the MTV VMAs. Kim added a closer look on Snapchat. For months that was the whole paper trail: a street photo, a model number that didn’t exist and a clip on Kim’s story.

The guess wasn’t unreasonable. Ye had already released the 750 and the 350, so a third number didn’t sound like a stretch. This one just wasn’t a new number.

February 2017: CP9654

It turned out to be a 350 V2, style CP9654, and it went out as the Zebra. adidas opened reservations on its Confirmed app on 22 Feb 2017 and released the shoe on 25 Feb. By then Hypebeast didn’t have to guess: a black and white Primeknit upper, with the SPLY-350 lettering in bold red.

Kim, who’d posted the first close-up, gave pairs away on Twitter as soon as it released.

The pair before the restocks

adidas kept bringing the Zebra back, as late as 31 May 2023 and 4 Jun 2024. Those pairs came in boxes, on a release calendar. The pair in Hall’s photo wasn’t one of them. It was a pre-release sample, on Ye’s feet before the Confirmed app knew the shoe existed.

Hypebeast’s 550 guess didn’t last long. The answer had been printed on the side of the shoe the whole time, in red: SPLY-350.