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