Kanye West, Designer (Yawn)

Taken from the NY Times:

AT the after-party for his first runway show here on Saturday night, Kanye West, even before the reviews came out, made an obscenity-laced speech in which he complained about people treating his aspiration to be a serious fashion designer as a joke, and said he had taken out loans to hire the best models, designers and location.

“I gave you everything that I had,” he said, one of his few printable remarks.

If that is true, Mr. West faces bigger obstacles in life than credit-card debt. His show was described by those who attended as, at best, a disappointment, and yet the rapper could be found almost everywhere during Paris Fashion Week defending himself.

At a dinner party in Azzedine Alaïa’s kitchen on Sunday, Mr. West complained rather bitterly to those assembled that he meant for those sausage-casing dresses, the sagging trousers and the swimming jackets dripping with sparkles and strips of fuzzy bits to fit the way that they did, though everyone else seemed to read them as a failure in tailoring. At the Céline show, he engaged Joe Zee, the creative director of Elle, in a lengthy dialogue, loud enough for everyone around them to hear, in which he noted, as one example, that he did not very much appreciate the criticism of his decision to show fur for summer.

“All I said was congratulations,” Mr. Zee said afterward. “I wasn’t even there.”

What was most confounding about Mr. West’s behavior, after years of obsessive study of the industry, was that he demonstrated very little understanding of how he might actually be perceived by retailers and editors who have a vast amount of experience at detecting utter nonsense. And he had promised them so much, telling the fashion director of one magazine, for example, that design was more important to him than music, and that he planned, with his runway debut, to “change the course of fashion.”

“There are wishes, and there are realities,” said Long Nguyen, the style director of Flaunt magazine. “I feel bad, actually, that there wasn’t anything to grab on to. But you can’t just dump some fox fur on a runway and call it luxury.”

Carine Roitfeld, the former French Vogue editor, said that for a first show it was not all that bad. “I’m sure he knows what he did wrong and what he did right,” she said. “He tried hard, and he wants to learn.”

Anna Wintour said, “Ask someone else.”

Mr. West will undoubtedly get another chance, and everyone will show up. Though he insisted he wanted to put an end to the conversation about a rapper-turned-designer, and that he had known he was “the one” since he was a boy, the fact that he is a celebrity is the reason that so many high-level people are even paying attention to him.

The front row at his show rather vividly underscored that utter lack of self-awareness, not that Mr. West, through his various tirades and his comment this summer that people look at him “like I’m Hitler,” has ever misled us on this point. Here, the Olsen twins were seated in the same row as Lindsay Lohan, and that was disturbing. Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, through their Elizabeth and James and Row collections, have established themselves as credible designers without making spectacles of themselves.

At the other extreme, Ms. Lohan almost single-handedly destroyed a French ready-to-wear label during a single season, as artistic adviser to Emanuel Ungaro two years ago. You wonder if Mr. West knows the difference.

His debut landed him a place somewhere in the middle: not quite a disaster, but not the work of a serious designer, either. Still, Mr. Zee said not to count him out just yet.

“If you get it all right on the first shot, where do you go from there?” he said. 

Article by: Eric Wilson

Here are some of the looks from his Spring 2012 collection:

Overall, I think his attempt as a fashion designer has failed - a lot of the clothing were poorly tailored and criticized fairly by the fashion experts. Nice try, Kanye.

Posted by: Christina Yu

JUST SAY NO THE THE TRENDING "TRIBAL PRINT"

Here is an article that I came across:

Urban Outfitter’s ‘Navajo’ Problem Becomes A Legal Issue

Pictured: Just some of the various "Navajo" items Urban Outfitters sells, including: the Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask, $18; the Navajo Hipster Panty, $8; and the Navajo Sock, on sale for $6.99.

Sasha Houston Brown of Minneapolis published a strongly worded open letter to Urban Outfitters yesterday at Racialicious. Brown, who directly addresses C.E.O. Glen Senk, takes the clothing chain to task for its appropriation of Native American arts and crafts, and its frequent use of the word "Navajo" in product names and descriptions:

This past weekend, I had the unfortunate experience of visiting a local Urban Outfitters store in Minneapolis. It appeared as though the recording "artist" Ke$ha had violently exploded in the store, leaving behind a cheap, vulgar and culturally offensive retail collection. Plastic dreamcatchers wrapped in pleather hung next to an indistinguishable mass of artificial feather jewelry and hyper sexualized clothing featuring an abundance of suede, fringe and inauthentic tribal patterns.
In all seriousness, as a Native American woman, I am deeply distressed by your company's mass marketed collection of distasteful and racially demeaning apparel and décor. I take personal offense to the blatant racism and perverted cultural appropriation your store features this season as "fashion."
All too often industries, sports teams and ignorant individuals legitimize racism under the guise of cultural "appreciation". There is nothing honorable or historically appreciative in selling items such as the Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask, Peace Treaty Feather Necklace, Staring at Stars Skull Native Headdress T-shirt or the Navajo Hipster Panty. These and the dozens of other tacky products you are currently selling referencing Native America make a mockery of our identity and unique cultures.

Brown's letter is passionate, informed, and well-argued. What could be more disrespectful than pilfering Native American intellectual property by knocking off tribal arts and crafts, and — rather than supporting Native artisans — having the knock-offs made cheaply overseas? All of the 24 items currently available in Urban Outfitters' online store that include the term "Navajo" in the name are imported, save one men's jacket and one women's jacket.

Selling a "Navajo Hipster Panty" may be cheesy and kind of offensive, but, more worrisomely perhaps for Urban Outfitters, it could also be illegal. In the U.S., under the terms of the Federal Indian Arts and Crafts act of 1990 and the Federal Trade Commission Act, it is prohibited to falsely claim, or even imply, that a product is Native American-made when it is not. The Department of the Interior says:

It is illegal to offer or display for sale, or sell any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian Tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization, resident within the United States. If a business violates the Act, it can face civil penalties or can be prosecuted and fined up to $1,000,000

"Navajo" isn't an aesthetic movement — it's a legal entity, a tribe of people, and an actual nation.

And, as it turns out, it's a nation with trademarks. The Navajo Nation holds 12 trademarks on the use of the term "Navajo," including two that cover various forms of clothing and one that covers online retailing. The Attorney General of the Navajo Nation actually wrote to Urban Outfitters months ago asking the corporation to cease and desist using its trademarks to sell clothing and accessories that have nothing to do with any actual Navajo people or designs.

Brown's letter elicited this comment from a user logged into the Disqus comment system as "Glen T Senk". It was posted around 10:30 p.m. EST yesterday:

Hello Sasha,
I am deeply sorry this issue has triggered an offended reaction from you. It is not our intention to demean or offend any native people. I hope you will be willing to call our head office in Philadelphia to discuss this issue at 1- 215-454-5500

That is in fact the phone number for Urban Outfitters' corporate headquarters. The number is, however, publicly available along with the contact information for all of Urban Outfitters' directors and corporate officers.

Glen Senk's assistant couldn't confirm whether it was really Senk who left the comment — "This is the first I'm hearing of it," she said when I reached her by phone this afternoon. A call to Urban Outfitters' PR department seeking clarification about the purported Senk's comment, and about the company's response to the Navajo Nation's cease-and-desist, has yet to be returned. Curious to know whether Brown herself called the number, I left a message for her as well. I'll update with their responses.

taken from: http://jezebel.com/5848715/urban-outfitters-navajo-problem-becomes-a-legal-issue

MY THOUGHTS:

I think we all need to be more socially conscious of what we wear - and not just throw on a piece of clothing not knowing where it came from - and on top of that, not knowing who is profiting off of it.  I know that living in this world of globalization, we cannot all be ethically perfect. But I do urge trying to be more aware about the clothing we wear , and knowing where they've come from.

This article is a great example of a company- like Urban Outfitters - getting called out for their carelessness, lack of understanding, and corporate greed. I do not think anyone should wear Navajo prints, unless they know that they have gotten the merchandise from a reliable source - one that is paying back to the person of Navajo descent who created the item. I think the Navajo Nation has suffered enough torture, oppression and loss throughout the past hundreds of years. Our country is based on colonization and the murdering of the Native American people - and as history tends to repeat itself- our present day corporations continue to silently murder them by stealing from them & placing them on desolate reservations.

I think a respectable solution to this would be for Urban Outfitters to market products actually made by the Navajo people, and divide the revenue accordingly. That would be an "everybody-wins" type of scenario. We'll see what happens...

Another great article to examine: http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/why-the-native-fashion-trend-is-pissing-off-real-native-americans/

Posted by: Christina Yu