‘For Years, I Was Asked to Come Back’

Tremaine Emory says he “felt great” about not “being complicit” after his exit from working with the artist formerly known as Kanye West.

In a new interview with Noah Callahan-Bever for Complex’s IDEA GENERATION, the Denim Tears founder went deep on a number of topics, including the period he spent working with Ye in a variety of roles. In fact, Emory said in the newly released interview that he was with the late Virgil Abloh in Milan when he got the initial call that would ultimately lead to him joining Ye’s team.

“I remember V was just like, ‘Guess you gotta go to Jedi school,’ like a joke,” Emory said of the New York invitation. Abloh, of course, had himself worked alongside Ye earlier into his career.

From there, Emory made a point to note that “everyone’s been fired by Kanye,” so much so that Abloh himself is said to have joked about it at Ye’s wedding. But when it came to first taking that step into Ye’s world, Emory had to navigate that on his own.

“V was a very ‘you gotta figure it out for yourself’ type of dude,” he said. “He was just supportive and he was just like, ‘You’ll learn a lot.’ That was, like, 2016. That was years before things got convoluted on the Ye side of things, in my opinion, and really catty and not nice. So V was super supportive.”

Emory said his work with Ye “started off as consulting” but quickly grew into much more.

“It was a myriad of things,” he explained. “It was really just asking your opinion and then some design. By the end of it, I was, like, creative director of G.O.O.D. Music and brand director of Yeezy.”

Deeper into his IDEA GEN chat, Emory, whose Arthur Jafa collab arrived earlier this year, was asked about his process of cultivating the confidence required to freely participate in the exchange of opinions crucial to Ye’s artistic process, which is known to bring on a “high-pressure” environment for all involved.

“For me, he’s a human being,” Emory said. “He ain’t god, you know what I mean? I’m just like, this is my opinion. If you disagree, cool. I wasn’t so caught up in the rapture of his accomplishments because I just knew I’m accomplished. I have a résumé too. My résumé counts, for me, just like yours counts for you.”

Perhaps inevitably, however, there did come a breaking point, of sorts, in Emory and Ye’s working relationship. While Emory puts the bulk of the blame on those around Ye, he’s still critical of the operation at large, at least as of late.