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

The Crocs Ripple clog, by footwear designer Steven Smith, on display at Flight Club, a sneaker boutique in Miami. Photo: The New York Times

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.