As Kanye’s profile increased, he developed a soft spot for popular streetwear brands of the aughts. There are photos of Ye wearing Supreme: a Surf Style-inspired hoodie and a Martin Luther King Jr. T-shirt the brand produced in 2003. For a newly emergent streetwear brand like LRG, identifying Kanye’s burgeoning influence on fashion helped it grow tremendously in the 2000s.

“We were the first to put him on a nationwide campaign,” says Kevin Delaney, the current VP of marketing at LRG who worked with co-marketing director Woodie White in 2003 to shoot Ye for LRG’s print campaign ads. “I feel like our own ascension as a brand was very parallel because right when The College Dropout dropped, boom. LRG in 2004 and 2005 really exploded. We doubled, tripled, and just went crazy.”

One of LRG’s most memorable products was the “Dead Serious” hoodie, a full-zip sweatshirt that resembled a skeleton that Ye wore to the Stella McCartney show at Paris Fashion Week in 2006. “When that photo came out, it went ‘viral’ before that even became a thing. There was a mad dash to try and find it on eBay,” remembers Delaney. When LRG re-released the same “Dead Serious” hoodie 15 years later in October of 2021, Delaney said they sold 10,000 units in six minutes.

“Kanye West’s style and influence had a massive impact on streetwear and the direction of fashion at the time,” writes Greg Selkoe, the founder of streetwear retailer Karmaloop, in an email to Complex. Selkoe developed a close relationship with Ye during the aughts. “It was an exciting time for streetwear with musicians like Pharrell and Kanye elevating style to be as important as the music they created. You had people like Cudi and Lupe Fiasco wearing skinny jeans, doing what they liked, and not what society prescribed to them as the right ‘hip-hop’ look. It was a global phenomenon and people like Kanye exemplified verge culture at the time.”