Ye wore all three Round Jacket colours before Gap put them on sale

Ye sat a few seats from Lewis Hamilton at Balenciaga’s couture show in Paris on 7 Jul 2021, face covered, in a black puffer with no zip and no buttons. PAUSE spotted Foam Runners on his feet. You couldn’t buy that jacket in black yet. Six days later, Gap opened pre-orders for it in Japan, Europe and the UK.

It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. Every colour of Yeezy Gap’s first product showed up on Ye before Gap put it on sale. The Round Jacket was the whole line at that point. Ye was its launch campaign.

June: blue, in LA

The blue came first. Highsnobiety’s timeline has it on Ye during a trip to LA the weekend before it dropped. It went up for pre-order on gap.com on 8 Jun 2021, Ye’s 44th birthday.

It’s a strange jacket, and that’s the point. The collar runs straight into the lapel, there’s nothing to close it with, and the YEEZY Gap tag sits inside where nobody sees it.

July: black, in Paris

The black was the quiet one, and it didn’t need a stage. Stephane Feugere’s photo of Ye at the couture show, which was Demna’s first for Balenciaga, ran with Highsnobiety’s story on the black release the following week. It shows a face covering, dark trousers and a jacket that could be a sleeping bag.

Atlanta: red, on a stadium floor

On 22 Jul 2021 Ye walked out onto the floor of Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta for the first Donda listening event. Variety described a red Yeezy x Gap puffer, matching red leather pants and orange Yeezy boots. It’s all there in the photos by Kevin Mazur for Getty Images and John Canon. Inverse and Hypebae both identified it as the red Round Jacket. Hypebeast reported its US pre-order on 6 Aug 2021, and by then the stadium photos had been out for two weeks.

Gap had the website and the pre-order button. Each time, the preview ran on Ye.