In 2016, as Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo pop-up shops opened in New York, teenage designer Austin Babbitt—known as Asspizza—began producing unofficial versions of the album’s merchandise on inexpensive T-shirts. He sold the shirts outside the official stores for approximately $20, openly presenting them as bootlegs rather than authorized products. The episode captured a particularly unruly moment in streetwear, when scarcity, fan customization, and unauthorized reproduction could generate more cultural excitement than the polished merchandise sold by a major celebrity brand. Babbitt’s versions were not merely copied in the eyes of their audience: their roughness and proximity to the street gave them an aura of authenticity that the official products lacked. Kanye West’s creative circle, including Virgil Abloh and Heron Preston, reportedly noticed the bootlegs and liked them enough to place Babbitt’s designs inside an actual Pablo pop-up shop alongside authorized T-shirts, hoodies, hats, and jackets. Babbitt summarized the contradiction by saying that the fake shirt was “more real than the real ones.” The incident blurred the boundary between counterfeit, fan art, and sanctioned collaboration: an unauthorized imitation was effectively absorbed into the luxury-pop ecosystem instead of being suppressed through a conventional intellectual-property dispute. No major lawsuit or criminal prosecution is identified in the supplied account, but the episode became a striking example of how celebrity fashion could convert infringement into hype, legitimacy, and commercial value.
Preparing the daily feature…
AI concept artworkArchive Record · 2010s
When Kanye West Turned Asspizza’s Pablo Bootlegs into Official Merchandise
Asspizza, Austin Babbitt, and Kanye West’s Pablo merchandise line / 2010s
In 2016, as Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo pop-up shops opened in New York, teenage designer Austin Babbitt—known as Asspizza—began producing unofficial versions of the album’s merchandise on inexpensive T-shirts. He sold the shirts outside the official stores for approximately $20, openly presenting them as bootlegs rather than authorized products. The episode captured a particularly unruly moment in streetwear, when scarcity, fan customization, and unauthorized reproduction could generate more cultural excitement than the polished merchandise sold by a major celebrity brand. Babbitt’s versions were not merely copied in the eyes of their audience: their roughness and proximity to the street gave them an aura of authenticity that the official products lacked. Kanye West’s creative circle, including Virgil Abloh and Heron Preston, reportedly noticed the bootlegs and liked them enough to place Babbitt’s designs inside an actual Pablo pop-up shop alongside authorized T-shirts, hoodies, hats, and jackets. Babbitt summarized the contradiction by saying that the fake shirt was “more real than the real ones.” The incident blurred the boundary between counterfeit, fan art, and sanctioned collaboration: an unauthorized imitation was effectively absorbed into the luxury-pop ecosystem instead of being suppressed through a conventional intellectual-property dispute. No major lawsuit or criminal prosecution is identified in the supplied account, but the episode became a striking example of how celebrity fashion could convert infringement into hype, legitimacy, and commercial value.
The daily editorial is currently unavailable. There’s still an entire archive to explore.