Ye jumped a Paris puddle in the 451. It released a year later, renamed.

It was raining in Paris on 1 Mar 2020. Ye’d just held a surprise Sunday Service during Fashion Week, and stepping out of the car, he jumped a puddle rather than land in it. Highsnobiety ran the photo. The shoes he was keeping dry were a sample of the Yeezy 451.

He’d first shown it almost two years before, and it didn’t look like anything else in the line. It took another year, and a new number, to reach shops.

April 2018: an early prototype on Twitter

Ye first posted it on 19 Apr 2018, in a tweet that read Yeezy 451 early prototype. It came in a run of new pairs he shared that day: a mesh runner with a moulded midsole that wrapped up and around the upper. Footwear News said he’d credited designer Steven Smith with helping on it. The tweet’s since been deleted.

March 2020: the sawtooth shell

By Paris the sole had grown into a sawtooth shell that climbed from the midsole to the eyelets. The midsole pushed right through the upper, and it wasn’t like any Yeezy before it. Ye wore his with black and cream trousers that looked like leather. It was the week of Yeezy Season 8, his first runway since 2016, Footwear News noted, and Highsnobiety called the pair the likely launch-ready design.

Two months later a leaked photo of a white and grey sample went round. Inverse wrote up the reaction: a floppy, sock-like collar inside a rubber rib cage, and a lot of pork bun jokes.

March 2021: the 451 becomes the 450

It released on 6 Mar 2021 in Cloud White, under a new number: the 450. Hypebeast explained the switch. It had been called the 451 for years because the 450 name was first thought to belong to a slide. There’s no Boost in it, just a moulded one-piece sole hugging a knit upper, and no outward branding except on the insole.

The shoe Ye carried over a puddle in Paris went on sale a year and five days later, with one digit knocked off.