For over a decade, the rap superstar has made music that pushes boundaries, courts controversy and divides critics. Now, the man who has compared himself to Jesus and Steve Jobs just wants to make clothes for the masses.

On a Sunday afternoon in early February, Kanye West was in a makeshift conference room at the downtown New York showroom of Adidas, mapping out his vision for fashion, and everything else, too. It was three days after the presentation of his first sportswear collection, Yeezy Season 1, at New York Fashion Week. Produced in collaboration with Adidas Originals, Yeezy was the culmination of more than a decade of striving, self-teaching, self-humbling and agitating for attention.

The Yeezy presentation — where Jay Z, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Alexander Wang, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, and their squalling daughter, North, sat in the front row alongside Anna Wintour — was not a traditional runway show. Instead, West had staged a phalanx of 50 models, many of them selected from an open call. The aesthetic of the unisex clothes borrowed from contemporary “athleisure” wear and traditional military surplus, distorting familiar silhouettes and distilling high-minded influences into street-ready looks. Not all the feedback was positive, but West seemed unfazed. “We destroyed the first village, the fashion village,” he told the group of 10 or so, graphic designers and members of his creative team obliged to attend a Sunday lunchtime meeting.

West, who is partial to lofty rhetoric, is most at ease when sermonizing, delivering extemporaneous speeches that are part Vince Lombardi, part Tony Robbins, part Martin Luther King Jr. (“They classify my motivational speeches as rants!” he has said.) As the group listened, rapt, he segued from his plans to teach feng shui and color theory in schools, to having passed on what he says was a multimillion dollar partnership with Apple, to — in language both admiring and profane — the surpassing perfection of Kris Jenner’s progeny. And then he got to his point.

“It’s literally like . . . I know this is really harsh, but it’s like Before Yeezy and After Yeezy,” West said. “This is the new Rome!” He was referring to his thunderous arrival in the fashion world, to his oft-mocked bid not merely to design clothes but to build, in his words, “the biggest apparel company in human history.” But he could just as easily have been talking about his own life and his recent attempts at self-transformation: his dogged efforts to remake himself, to find a comfortable balance between the self-proclaimed genius and provocateur with the hair-trigger temper he’s been, and the more moderate, approachable, self-controlled designer-of-the-people he’s trying so strenuously to become — all without losing his essential Kanye-ness.

IN THE CAR on the way home from the meeting, West took a call from Kardashian, the high priestess of reality television and America’s leading entrepreneur of the self, whose own towering fame has combined with West’s to create a historic blizzard of celebrity. When the couple appeared together on the cover of Vogue last year, the move was, depending on your perspective, a stroke of PR genius or a naked plea for highbrow validation.

“It went really good up at Adidas today,” West told Kardashian, and they chitchatted for a minute like any married couple. Then he paused, obviously listening to her. It was clear from his face that he enjoys this role — collaborator, producer, Pygmalion: “I like the black latex, also with the black fur, and then maybe with tights and the Alaïa high lace-ups,” he said.

West is one of the true music superstars of the 2000s, the rare artist respected as both a pop musician and experimenter, renowned as much for his creative endeavors as for his tabloid exploits. He has remade hip-hop’s sonic palette three, maybe four times. His musical legacy is peerless. And yet, as accomplished as he is, West has, for the past five years, openly sought success and acceptance in the world of fashion. It’s a pursuit that many see as a quixotic fixation, and has often been poignant to watch: West, ever-earnest and transparent about his sartorial ambitions, has attempted to launch himself in a new realm where his massive, inescapable celebrity does not necessarily confer any significant advantage.

Of course, musicians have been crossing over into fashion for decades, capitalizing on their cool to do a T-shirt line or maybe a capsule collection. Some have even tried to build companies: Think Jay Z with Rocawear or Sean Combs with Sean John. But West wants something different — a seat not just in the front row (though he does want that) but at the creative table.

A couple of years ago, in 2013, West could be found inveighing against the gatekeepers he perceived as impediments to his success: the designers who wouldn’t collaborate with him, the financiers who wouldn’t back him. He did this in interviews as well as on stage, from the 60-foot tall mountain that was the centerpiece of his Yeezus tour. “I would scream — ‘Look at this mountain I just made! You don’t think I can make a T-shirt?’ ” he told me. “ ’Look at everyone in the audience — we’re selling $300,000 worth of T-shirts every night!’ ”

To West, his struggle was at root one against skepticism and prejudice. Because while it might be argued that his celebrity allowed for a line-skipping of sorts, he feels it was more frequently an obstacle (a sentiment that is perhaps not surprising from the man who has likened celebrities’ fight for privacy to the civil rights movement). “Fame is often looked down upon in the design world, so it’s actually been something I had to overcome,” he wrote on Twitter when Fern Mallis, the creator of New York Fashion Week, told The New York Post that she was “kind of over Kanye”: “I mean, I’m not a fan of his music, and the attitude and the agenda are not my style.”

In West’s telling, he’s had to howl because fashion people weren’t listening, and he needed their ear. “I one hundred percent had to scream,” he said. “I tried it every other way.”

In fact, he had: He’d previously made inroads via collaborations with Louis Vuitton and Nike (limited-edition sneakers), as well as with A.P.C. (two small collections that included jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts). He also, in 2011 and 2012, presented two women’s ready-to-wear collections that were pilloried for their amateurism. But those were arguably ideas born of the old Kanye, the one for whom luxury and exclusivity were the ultimate goals. New Kanye wants everyone to have a taste of luxury, but without the hefty price tag. He aspires to bring forward-thinking clothes to the masses. Clearly fast fashion has been done — and successfully, if not always ethically — by retailers like Zara and H&M. But West wants to design what might be called fast high fashion: clothes that are truly avant-garde in their design, made from the finest materials, and that would arrive with lightning-quick speed in stores where they could be bought by the public at affordable prices. The Adidas deal is one step — his contract guarantees him a retail location, he said, and stores have begun placing orders — toward a future he’s still working out.

West’s overall ambition is to be to fashion what he is to music: a mainstream innovator, a translator of tomorrow’s ideas for today. “Before the Internet, music was really expensive. People would use a rack of CDs to show class, to show they had made it,” West said at one point. “Right now, people use clothes to telegraph that. I want to destroy that. The very thing that supposedly made me special — the jacket that no one could get, the direct communications with the designers — I want to give that to the world.” Needless to say, there are plenty of differences between the path to success in either field. These days, a good song can travel a near-frictionless journey from creation to consumption. It’s harder to get from the fringes to the center in fashion; a designer needs money, infrastructure and channels of distribution for his or her work to get seen. Plus, it’s a world where exclusivity has cachet. When West says he wants everyone to have access to high-end style, there are plenty who find the idea the very antithesis of luxury.

Because the Yeezy collection is sportswear, there were no suits, no tailored trousers or collared shirts. The looks shown at NYFW were a streamlined, democratized version of what West (who has said, of his personal style, “I want to dress like a child as much as possible”) usually wears. Lately, that’s often been a velour sweatshirt by Haider Ackermann (retail price: $768), topped with a modified MA-1 bomber jacket by Takahiro Miyashita ($1,778). This is not, West clarifies, the level of affordability he’s striving for in the clothes he’s making. He claims that he’s not wearing luxury for luxury’s sake but rather as a form of research. “There’s a transition,” he says. “I need to partake in what’s of value and of quality and soul in order to understand it, in order to give it back.”