In the piece written by Jon Caramanica for NY Times Style Magazine, Kanye West is the topic of discussion. The article delves into Ye’s fashion endeavors, Yeezy Season debut, his rants, family, and a lot more. Below we have a few quotes.
The Yeezy presentation — where Jay Z, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Alexander Wang, West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, and their squalling daughter, North, sat in the front row alongside Anna Wintour — was not a traditional runway show. Instead, West had staged a phalanx of 50 models, many of them selected from an open call. The aesthetic of the unisex clothes borrowed from contemporary “athleisure” wear and traditional military surplus, distorting familiar silhouettes and distilling high-minded influences into street-ready looks. Not all the feedback was positive, but West seemed unfazed. “We destroyed the first village, the fashion village,” he told the group of 10 or so, graphic designers and members of his creative team obliged to attend a Sunday lunchtime meeting.
West, who is partial to lofty rhetoric, is most at ease when sermonizing, delivering extemporaneous speeches that are part Vince Lombardi, part Tony Robbins, part Martin Luther King Jr. (“They classify my motivational speeches as rants!” he has said.) As the group listened, rapt, he segued from his plans to teach feng shui and color theory in schools, to having passed on what he says was a multimillion dollar partnership with Apple, to — in language both admiring and profane — the surpassing perfection of Kris Jenner’s progeny. And then he got to his point.
“It’s literally like .?.?. I know this is really harsh, but it’s like Before Yeezy and After Yeezy,” West said. “This is the new Rome!” He was referring to his thunderous arrival in the fashion world, to his oft-mocked bid not merely to design clothes but to build, in his words, “the biggest apparel company in human history.” But he could just as easily have been talking about his own life and his recent attempts at self-transformation: his dogged efforts to remake himself, to find a comfortable balance between the self-proclaimed genius and provocateur with the hair-trigger temper he’s been, and the more moderate, approachable, self-controlled designer-of-the-people he’s trying so strenuously to become — all without losing his essential Kanye-ness.
West’s overall ambition is to be to fashion what he is to music: a mainstream innovator, a translator of tomorrow’s ideas for today. “Before the Internet, music was really expensive. People would use a rack of CDs to show class, to show they had made it,” West said at one point. “Right now, people use clothes to telegraph that. I want to destroy that. The very thing that supposedly made me special — the jacket that no one could get, the direct communications with the designers — I want to give that to the world.” Needless to say, there are plenty of differences between the path to success in either field. These days, a good song can travel a near-frictionless journey from creation to consumption. It’s harder to get from the fringes to the center in fashion; a designer needs money, infrastructure and channels of distribution for his or her work to get seen. Plus, it’s a world where exclusivity has cachet. When West says he wants everyone to have access to high-end style, there are plenty who find the idea the very antithesis of luxury.
Generally, though, the current-day West seems tempered — at least somewhat. Maybe this is owing to his newfound domesticity. He takes his role as a husband and father seriously. “I feel like now I have an amazing wife, a supersmart child and the opportunity to create in two major fields,” he said. “Before I had those outlets, my ego was all I had.” But he also speaks “all the time” to a doctor who specializes in anger management therapy, a fortuitous byproduct of an altercation with a paparazzo at Los Angeles International Airport. (He had two such incidents; the second time he was court-ordered to anger management.)
Read the whole article here.
