On the morning that the Yeezy Gap hoodie dropped last month, I'd set up shop at a café by my apartment in Brooklyn. It's a place frequented by the kinds of patrons who wear tightly-rolled fisherman beanies and Aimé Leon Dore New Balances. A pair of twenty-something men sat down at the table next to mine and I overheard them chatting while feverishly scrolling on their phones. I only caught bits of their conversation-"What color should I get?" and "Wait, are they sold out already?"-but I had a hunch that they were talking about Kanye's new "perfect hoodie." Plus, I'd already, sheepishly, ordered myself a purple one that morning. So I leaned over to ask if they were talking about the Yeezy hoodie. They burst out laughing, because of course they were.
Now a month later, Business of Fashion reports, the Yeezy Gap hoodies are among the most traded streetwear items on the resale site StockX, with around 6,000 sold so far. And they've got heat, going for around 50 percent above their retail price of $90."That puts them in fairly rarefied company when it comes to other Yeezy releases," says Jesse Einhorn, senior economist at StockX. By comparison, apparel from Ye's own Yeezy brand usually sells at a 30 percent markup.
Though the hoodie, which was only available via presale in late September, is the second garment that's been released from Kanye West's Yeezy collaboration with Gap, it's the first that the public has actually been able to get their hands on. (The collab's debut item, a globular puffer jacket, has already had three presales for different colorways since June, but they won't ship until later this year.) Once people started receiving their sweatshirts in the mail, arriving in nondescript brown-paper-bag packaging, happy customers quickly flocked to Twitter, crowning it "the best hoodie they'd ever seen," adding that the double-ply fabric felt even more high-quality than they'd expected from a mass-retail brand. And though the hoodie was released in six different colors, the bright M&M-blue shade seems to be the most popular: according to BoF, the blue hoodie has been the most traded streetwear item on StockX every day for the past week. Maybe it's because Kanye himself seems to wear the blue one the most-a point I discussed with my new café comrades while they were deciding which one to order for themselves.
Unfortunately, when my own hoodie arrived in the mail, I was bummed to discover it was more of a maroon color rather than the purple Play-Doh shade I'd hoped for (and that the vest that Ye's daughter North West wore during the Yeezy Season 8 show in Paris early last year seemed to suggest). Might be time to head to StockX.