Social intelligence

Blasblog From Paris: The Kanye Chronicles

January 26, 2009  10:53 am

As any fashion editor will tell you nowadays, it’s not a fashion show unless Kanye West is in the front row. The rapper/designer, who has been known to dabble in the fashionable arts—see Louis Vuitton, big orange kicks—hasn’t missed a beat at the menswear collections, taking on a schedule that would rival the editors that actually have to be there. On Sunday alone, the closing day of men’s fashion week, he hit Lanvin (”that was the jam”), Dior, Dunhill (”I’ve known Kim Jones from way back, and I’m glad to see my boy doing something good”), and Gareth Pugh’s debut men’s show, where I joined him in waiting for nearly an hour in the foyer of the Palais de Tokyo. That’s where he revealed he nearly didn’t make it to Paris: It turns out when he flew to Washington, D.C., to perform at one of the many inaugural balls (would you believe the tuxedo he rocked was picked up off-the-rack at Brooks Brothers that day?), he left his passport in L.A. That must have been some performance, because he managed to get a last-minute passport from State Department officials and hop on a plane just in time to make Raf Simons. West isn’t not going anywhere soon, either. At Pugh, he announced that he was happily staying in the City of Light for his first ever Couture fashion week. “I’m getting more and more inspired,” he said, adding that he’s already come up with a list of ideas for future pieces for more LV collaborations from the shows he’s already seen. But until then, it’s hurry and wait as usual—which, as any fashion editor will tell you, can be tedious if one can’t create forms of amusement. Perhaps that’s why Kanye and his seven-man entourage came up with “Fashion Battles,” in which they pit the most daring of looks in the audience against each other. (That’s why he asked for this pic of him and Daphne Guinness.) All was well and fine until one daring pair of young men showed up—one with his culottes pants tucked into platform YSL shoes, and his friend in a full-body leather look, resembling Milla Jovovich’s wardrobe on her Joan of Arc movie. Asked Kanye, “How can you beat that?”

tags: Blasblog, Daphne Guinness, Gareth Pugh, Kanye West, Menswear shows

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1. Vuitton’s ‘big orange kicks”,I thought they were red must be my screen, whatever: what a joke! Is that “a design”?
   And posing with Daphne Guinness makes him a designer?
   You fashion editors can write what you want and if you write enough to brainwash the fashion sheeps in the end they shall believe it as you do. But Kanye West wouldn’t have been in fashion at all if he wasn’t a celebrity! And he’s not the only one….fashiolebrity or something like that….YAAAAAAAAAAAWNNNNNN……

   By Appollonia on 01/26/09 at 1:57 pm

2. Don’t be so rude Appollonia, but you have certainly a good point. Ciao

   By Valerio on 01/27/09 at 7:34 am

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