Steven Smith, designer of some of Yeezy’s famous shoes, now creates for Crocs

In August 2024, without warning and quite publicly, Steven Smith was out from his job designing shoes with Kanye West (known mononymously as Ye).

For eight years, he had helped mint Jet Ski-like sneakers and spartan slides, pushing the reported valuation of Yeezy’s sneaker business alone as high as US$3bil (approximately RM12.2bil) in 2019.

Smith was loyal. He hung on as his boss’s outbursts skittered into antisemitism and vitriol against perceived enemies. He stayed through Ye’s breakup with Adidas and a flaccid presidential bid.

When Smith was done, he didn’t go quietly.

“He’s lost his mind,” Smith told Fast Company at the time. “The whole of Yeezy is circling the drain and this is just part of it.”

Still, sudden unemployment was perilous for him.

“If I stop creating, it’s going to kill me,” Smith, 60, said in Miami this month. In his default, self-assured way of speaking, he described his creative output as a “fire hose”.

Since starting his career at New Balance in 1986, when he was 21, Smith has bounced between nearly every major sneaker company in the US, working on dozens of shoes, many of which continue to fill shelves.

While not quite a household name (the only sneaker designer who rises to that level may be Tinker Hatfield of Nike), he has, over four decades, diligently guided the sorts of shoes we wear.

If you’ve worn Adidas’ awesomely 1990s Artillery