Editor’s Note

Perhaps, instead of sending models down the catwalk of his Paris fashion show wearing shirts with slogans that many have found offensive, Kanye West or Yeezy or YZY, or whoever he is now, should have tried something a bit more subtle. But subtlety isn’t his strong suit. Why be subtle when you can have the fashion world up in arms with Vanessa Friedman, fashion director for the New York Times, wondering whether he truly believes he can appropriate the language of racial violence with irony? Or whether he believes that someday the power structure of Black and White will be reversed, and since he says this collection is the future, that’s the world he envisions?

Or if Ye just gets a kick out of pushing everyone’s buttons? Or if he’s intent on seeing how far he can go and doesn’t really care about, or think about, the collateral damage in the meantime? The day after the show, Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue, called the shirt “inappropriate” and “insensitive, given the state of the world”.

If you ask me, Ye is lapping it up, loving the publicity, his name in headlines and his face splashed across screens, no matter how negative the commentary is. His shock tactics are hardly profound. “You can’t manage me,” he said in a speech at the show. “This is an unmanageable situation.”

Back on home soil, we have the opportunity to see a much more thought-provoking message conveyed via fabric. Artist Yinka Shonibare CBE, currently exhibiting in Cape Town, has spent his life between England and Nigeria and, because of his intimate experience of vastly varied cultures, has an abiding interest in identity politics. He calls himself a “postcolonial hybrid”. Shonibare’s primary preoccupation is with crosscultural identity the way that we all influence, borrow from, steal from, criticise and, if we get it right, respect each other’s cultures.

I’m sending Ye a VIP invite.

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