Where’s Kanye West?
If you were waiting for Kanye West to emerge during New York Fashion Week, keep waiting. He didn’t emerge to take a bow or to wave at his audience at the presentation of Season 5 of his Yeezy Collection last week, adding to the mystery of what’s going on with the musician and designer.
West has been photographed here and there, including this past Tuesday as he prepared for his show, but he’s kept a low profile since late last year. He had a series of onstage rants, followed by the premature cancellation of his Saint Pablo tour, a hospitalization and a very public visit to Trump Tower.
Typically, designers walk out to see the audience after showing their collections. But once models at his New York show made their final walk, West didn’t emerge, as he’d done at all of his other presentations.
That’s where things got murky. Was something else going to happen? But West never stepped out to give the universal signal that the show’s over, folks. His wife, Kim Kardashian, remained seated, but she eventually got up to head backstage before pausing to motion for Anna Wintour to join her.
Although Kardashian has slowly returned to the public eye and social media after being robbed at gunpoint in Paris last year, West has been more under the radar. He was absent at the recent Grammy Awards ceremony, where he was nominated in five categories.
His most public moment in recent months came when he met with then-U.S. president-elect Donald Trump, who said the pair “discussed life.”
The two smiled and hugged for the cameras in the Trump Tower lobby. Later, West fired off a series of tweets explaining that he “wanted to meet with Trump ... to discuss multicultural issues.”
“I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future president if we truly want change,” he also tweeted.
West hasn’t said much publicly since — but he did delete those Trump tweets just a few weeks ago.