Ye posted the first Yeezy Slide in 2018 and called it a rough draft

Ye tweeted a photo of a table on 19 Apr 2018, lined with 350 V2s, 700s and 500s in colours nobody had seen. He’d just announced release dates for his own album, a joint one with Kid Cudi and records from Pusha T and Teyana Taylor, and he wasn’t done. Close-ups followed, then a basketball shoe, then a chunky blue slide with a jagged sole. He captioned it Yeezy slides.

That blue slide is the first look at the Yeezy Slide. It’s almost nothing like the shoe adidas released 20 months later. The road between the two runs through a lot of jokes, a wedding in Miami and one infographic.

“Rough draft”

The internet got to it before Ye could explain. Paper rounded up tweets comparing it to eight different things. Ye called it a “rough draft” for next season’s slides, and he didn’t sound worried: “Grocery story drip Erewhon drip laundry day drip airport drip,” he tweeted on 20 Apr.

It wasn’t his first slide, either. Highsnobiety dates the in-house Yeezy label’s first slides to late March 2018: plain, earth-toned and a little oversized.

Too small, on purpose

Those in-house slides got their big moment that August. Ye wore a pair with a Louis Vuitton suit to 2 Chainz’s wedding in Miami, and they looked a few sizes too small, heels hanging off the back. Highsnobiety wrote that Twitter “had a field day”. Then he tweeted an infographic on wearing slides “the Japanese way”, heel over the edge. That’s exactly how he’d worn them.

“Turns out, though, that the joke was on us.” Fabian Gorsler, Highsnobiety

December 2019: one piece of foam

The finished shoe surfaced in October 2019, when Kim Kardashian showed pairs on her Instagram Story, kids’ sizes included. On 6 Dec 2019 adidas released the Yeezy Slide in Desert Sand, Bone and Resin, at $55 for adults, $45 for kids and $35 for infants, Hypebeast reported. It’s a single piece of EVA foam with grooves cut deep into the outsole.

The blue didn’t make it, and neither did the clog. What survived was the plan in Ye’s second tweet: a slide for the grocery store, the laundry and the airport.