Who is Guillermo Andrade; the streetwear designer who may or may not be Kanye’s next collaboration?

Who knew that an innocuous lunch with a streetwear designer would cause a wave of speculation across social media? But he’s got us talking once again - Kanye West and his new wife Bianca Censori were caught having lunch in West Hollywood and shopping on Melrose Place with an individual known as Guillermo Andrade.

So? Well, it happens that Guillermo Andrade is one of Los Angeles’ prestigious streetwear designers, having launched his brand 424 and opening a flagship store in Fairfax after his early successes in the West Coast fashion scene. The item that helped elevate him as one of the urban designers to look out for? Accessories for sneakers, under the mantle Sneaker Crowns.

Now, call us and everyone else speculating crazy, but given that Kanye West’s brand has seemingly survived not only his controversial comments back in 2022 but Yeezy’s have appreciated in price on secondary seller websites, could Kanye be looking at a collaboration with the Guatemalan? The designer has had success before launching brands and having the distinct honour of collaborating with, among others, the estate of Tupac Shakur.

Andrade has also collaborated numerous times with Adidas, which just so happens to be the company that dropped Kanye West and his Yeezy brand amid his anti-Semitic comments in late 2022. Adidas is currently staring down its first loss as a sportswear company in three decades, as the Yeezy brand has cost them £422 million (estimate) and 1.1 billion pairs that they can sell after an agreement with West, but morally do they want to?

Or it could just be that Kanye is giving some advice to a designer from his perspective as a hip-hop impresario; maybe Guillermo Andrade is looking to launch a music career and was asking Kanye how to spit beats more proficiently. Whatever the reason, PeopleWorld has had a look at the life of Guillermo Andrade, come what may after the lunch-and-shopping meeting.

Who is Guillermo Andrade?

The Guatemalan-born Andrade was raised in the Bay Area of California, and from an early age was obsessed with being as different in terms of his style choices as his contemporaries, opting to wear brands such as Ecko and Triple Five Soul instead of Hurley, Quicksilver and brands the media would tout as “on trend.”

“They just looked at me like I was crazy,” Andrade told Dazed Magazine in their Dazed100 feature. Even though my family didn’t have much, I didn’t care – I decided I was always gonna look like a million dollars.” It was that spirit of accentuating the positives rather than focusing on the negatives that led Andrade to ensure his work made you feel like you were worth a fortune, without having to spend a fortune - the idea of making high fashion affordable. “I remember every detail of the shift that happened in the urban community – specifically with the high end accepting the low,” he remarked once again to Dazed Magazine.

His early contributions to West Coast fashion saw the streetwear designer produce jewellery items centred around limited edition sterling silver pieces and chains, adopting the maximalist accessorising mantra that was slowly fading out after Y2K fashion was, for then, done and dusted. It was in 2014 that Andrade created his first line of shoe accessories, called Sneaker Crowns.

Sneaker Crowns were, for lack of a better explanation, jewellery that people could apply to their brand new fresh pair of sneakers, adding additional sparkle to the already neat-and-tidy ice creams sneakerheads would queue up for. It was a success for Andrade, picking an idea that seems redundant in theory, yet the hype behind the accessories and their affordability made them a hit.

It led Andrade to officially launch his own business - his brand 424 and the flagship FourTwoFour store on Fairfax in 2010 - it quickly became a fixture in the Los Angeles streetwear and men’s wear community. The brand itself was founded to create a space for cutting-edge ideas of fashion, lifestyle, music, and art while the store provided ready-to-wear collections and jewellery influenced by contemporary art and Los Angeles street style elements.

The official formation of 424 led to some very high-profile collaborations - the first with Japanese brand Doublet, which continues to this day, followed by collaborations with late rapper Tupac Shakur’s estate and Kanye West’s former collaborative partner Adidas. In the twelve years since starting 424 and opening the flagship store, Andrade garnered enough experience that he subsequently launched a couple more off-shoot brands through 424; Fear of God, Rhude, Vlone and Second Layer.

For UK audiences, the name might also be familiar among London football fans - 424 was the official choice of menswear for Arsenal in the 2020 football season. Speaking about his first ten years of success, Andrade told Women’s Wear Daily in 2020 “I always look at the first decade of my journey and the work [as] lessons I was learning. “I really wanted to prepare myself and learn as much as possible to put myself in the position I’m in now. I feel like this time that I’ve spent has really served me well.”

Perhaps even more important from that interview, especially for Kanye West, is that Andrade’s goal changed throughout his maturity in the fashion world; in the past, he viewed working on a collection as a way to bring an idea to life, but in later life, it’s more about a way to keep people employed.