Why doesn’t Kanye West smile? He explains his paradoxical reasoning

Kanye West told the crowd at the Fashion Los Angeles Awards that he stopped smiling in pictures a few years back because he decided it doesn’t “look as cool.”

“Back when I was working on Yeezus, I saw this book from the 1800s and it was velvet-covered with brass and everything,” Kanye said while presenting an award to Milk Studios founder Mazdack Rossi, E! News reports. “I looked at all these people’s photos and they look so real and their outfits were incredible and they weren’t smiling.”

Kanye explained that motivated him to adopt the same pose as the people in the old daguerreotypes — although I’m just not sure he realizes that daguerreotypes required extremely long exposure times, which made it hard to hold a smile. Anyway, Kanye added, “I think, not smiling makes me smile…When you see paintings in an old castle, people are not smiling cause it just wouldn’t look as cool.”

That’s a little bit of a different rationality than wife Kim Kardashian, who said she refrains from smiling or laughing too often because that causes wrinkles.

After dropping those insight bombs, Kanye went on to explain everyone is a fashion insider because “it’s illegal to be naked” and that fashion is God’s work: “We have the power to change the world. I believe that through design, because design is the closest to truth, problem solving truth is the closest to love, and love is the closest thing to God, and God is love.”