The hyped to memed pipeline was short with this one. Teased back in 2021 and recently re-released globally, the YEEZY Gap Round Jacket has been causing a stir online – for all the wrong reasons.
On paper, or should we say on the rack, it looks great – coming in black and blue colourways, the Round Jacket is available in a wide XXS-XXXL size range. It also features a poplin design, constructed of recycled nylon with a matte rubberised PU coating. It’s silhouette is unique, helping it to carve a recognisable space in the outerwear world – in short, it’s puffy, cropped, and as the name suggests, round. However – this is not necessarily a good thing. Although we love an oversized fit, there’s something about the jacket’s round shape that doesn’t sit, or fit, quite right – but we’ll get to that later.
Another one of its potential appeals is its simplicity – Ye is not here for logomania, only attaching a simple YEEZY Gap logo tag on the jacket’s interior. Accompanied by a thickly-veiled marketing campaign in the form of Ye’s Heaven and Hell music video, in which the jacket made its debut on the video’s cast, it seemed like the ongoing YEEZY Gap partnership had produced a winner.
And then came the reviews. As the jacket started shipping (in a more than palatable 1-2 weeks, actually), people started getting their hands on the jacket and flexing their fit. Whilst some managed to style it up nicely, others had more trouble – with one TikTok-er saying it made him feel “like the blueberry girl from Willy Wonka”. Violet Beauregard wishes.
The same bemused customer also commented on the quality – saying that the material felt delicate and thin, like it could “rip very easily”. However, much of the CULTED community disagreed – with @princetycoonkobain expressing that “they just wearing it wrong” and others pointing out that he hadn’t made use of the tightening straps, or that it just was “not for him”.
Twitter has been weighing in on the jacket’s reception too, with user @saddadsanchez tweeting that he “never looked this crazy in a jacket ever my girl almost died from laughter” – leading to a barrage of memes clowning his fit. Our particular favourite? “It’s giving M&M”.
Whilst ‘Round Jacket Sanchez’ will be sending his back, there have been some successful fits. Some have managed to make the oversized blue silhouette work to their advantage, but the majority of the successful fit pics actually feature the black colourway. It’s not hard to see why – the black version offers a more understated and versatile option for an already semi-avant garde silhouette for the average hypebeast.
More remnant of Ye’s recent all-black fits too, we can see where YEEZY and Gap were going with the vision. And hey, if you’re up for a styling challenge this may be the perfect piece. However, we still won’t be buying the jacket, sorry. Maybe it’s the ongoing flood of bad reviews that keep popping up, or maybe it’s the fact that it just doesn’t look right. With oversized fits, there’s a certain appeal in the prescribed broad shoulders, shapeless hang and ability to be swallowed up by the piece. Here, the jacket’s cropped silhouette means that you don’t get that level of enveloping – it’s like a warm duvet that’s just a bit too small to do its job. Priced at US $200, we’d rather avoid the Violet Beauregard comparisons and stick to something a little more practical.
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