Kanye’s daughter steals spotlight at Yeezy show
The rapper held his fashion show at Paris Fashion Week
Kanye West presented Yeezy Season 8 in front of the French Communist Party headquarters building in Paris, but what came down the runway was less a ready-forretail collection and more a creative, thinking-out-loud work in progress.
And what made this strangely fascinating undertaking, which explored the creation of the collection, even more interesting happened late in the game. That’s when West’s six-year-old daughter North took the spotlight by rapping.
At a backstage preview, held in the same domed semi-subterranean space at the venue where Thom Browne made his Paris Fashion Week debut nearly a decade ago, West explained the collection and more.
Rooted in a neutral color palette of gray and beige, the work-in-progress collection was heavy on puffer pieces, which included hooded jackets, tall-collared crop tops and most notably for fans of the Adidas collaboration footwear sneakers with wrap-around quilted uppers that gave them an Ugg boot vibe.
Also in the mix were knit bra tops, a knit upper-arm band with a smartphone pocket, high-waisted sweatpant-legging hybrids that flared at the ankle and a beige T-shirt depicting what appeared to be a horse (rendered in an airbrushed art style worthy of a 1970s-era custompainted van), face-obscuring hooded parkas and balaclavas.
A few pieces, including a puffer-style jacket and pair of pants, seemed composed of wispy strands of wool packed together like a sheep with bedhead. There was nary a visible button, zipper or closure save for a single drawstring waistband on a pair of baggy trousers.
“This is all experimental,” West said. “We’re just looking at different ways to approach things. I mean, 90 per cent of the collection is in muslin.”
The four-legged residents of his Cody, Wyo, ranch factored into this experiment, he said. “We have 700 sheep, the most sheep in America now, I think so we’re trying out different kinds of felting with the wool,” West said. “It’s the beginning of a new language.”
West’s stream-of-consciousness discourse about the collection (which, in all honesty, was a bit hard to follow) touched on inspiration (“the idea [of being] in service, service clothing” the latter of which we took to mean household help, nannies and the like), the story behind a particular hooded, gray, rubberised suit (“I’ve always been obsessed with hazmat [suits] and that whole kind of vibe”) and why he brought his 100-strong Sunday Service choir to a small theatre during Paris Fashion Week (“To spread the holy spirit that’s my job as a Christian,” he said in answer to a reporter’s inquiry).
The most illuminating part of the conversation, though, was his explanation as to why he popped up in Paris in the first place to present a work-in-progress collection after a several-year hiatus from the runway.
“I stopped doing [Sunday Service] merch like four months ago,” West said. “And then we started working on the opera because I wasn’t pushing myself enough. And I remember when I first started doing fashion and we did the first Kanye collections, everyone just said, ‘Do a T-shirt. The Row started out with a Tshirt’ because they had to do a celebrity comparison.” (The Row is the fashion label founded in 2006 by sisters Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen.)
“We fought to not do T-shirts, and then I looked up and I was only doing T-shirts,” he said. “So we stopped and just started focusing on changing and making new shapes.”