While designer icons like Marc Jacobs, Zac Posen and Dion Lee, quietly prepare themselves to reveal their 2016 fall and winter collections at New York Fashion Week, there is one man that wants to make some serious noise.
Enter Kanye West. (And no, I’m not referring to his long haul of Twitter posts, musings or cry for money banter).
West has taken centre stage at this year’s New York Fashion Week with his Yeezy Season 3 extravaganza held at Madison Square Garden. While he unveiled (literally) his third Yeezy collection for adidas, he also debuted the release his seventh solo album “The Life of Pablo”, formerly “Waves”, formerly “Swish”, formerly “So Help Me God).
In attendance was Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, Gigi and Bella Hadid, Jay Z, and North West, all listening to West’s collaborations with Chance the Rapper, Frank Ocean, Kelly Price, Kirk Franklin, El DeBarge, Rihanna, Future, Kid Cudi, Ty Dolla Sign and the Weeknd.
Not only did West hire about 1200 models who were primarily black but he also surprised the audience with legendary supermodels Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb and Alek Wek.
Most impressive was the shows opening. West collaborated once again with Italian conceptual artist, Vanessa Beecroft. Beecroft presented an enormous grey sheet that flowed and undulated over orbicular shapes, only to reveal at the end of the first song, an entire fashion village: hundreds of models in an encampment that waged either poverty or a post-apocalyptic community.
West and Beecroft’s joint vision comes from the reappropriation of a 20-year-old photograph by British photographer Paul Lowe. The original photograph was taken in southern Rwanda in April 1995. Thousands of Hutus had crowded into confinement at the Kibeho camp; a day after Tutsi soldiers had massacred thousands of people there.
Yeezy Season 3 showcased male and female models, clothed in a desert palette of brown, burgundy, saffron, lemon yellow, silver, purple, dusty rose and engulfed in hazes of smoke and spotlights, channeling the emptiness and despair of the Hutu survivors. The performance used the command of stillness along with subtle movements that fluctuated from somnolent and dejected. Toward the end of the show, some models raised their fists in a public declaration of defiance.
Mid-show West proclaimed his ultimate dream:
“But my dream, I told Anna this backstage, is to be, at least for a couple years, the creative director of Hermés. That would be a dream of mine. I just want to bring as much beauty to the world as possible. I’m only 38 years old”.
Maybe West has earned himself a seat in the fashion world after all; it only took a 20,000-person show-slash-album-release in Madison Square Garden to make it happen.
Let’s see if he will stay seated.
Don’t be casual now.
Cover Image: mirror.co.uk
the hemingway complex 