Kanye West’s First Fashion Collection
Kanye West’s First Collection Featured All White Models
Vogue’s Anna Wintour was just one of the many celebrity editors in attendance at Kanye West’s very first fashion collection in Paris. She was joined by a stellar collection of photographers like Terry Richardson and a slew of celebrities like Ciara, Lindsay Lohan as well as Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.
Also in attendance were top fashion designers Jeremy Scott, Joseph Altuzarra, Azzedine Alaïa, Alexander Wang as well as Dan and Dean Caten of DSquared2. Kanye has attended shows for those same designers for many years.
Oddly the collection was featured on an all-star cast of all white models except for two black models.
Collection Not Well Received
To say that Kanye’s new fashion collection was not well received is an understatement. The fashion press was brutal. The collection was ravaged and criticized for everything from not featuring more black models to the extreme embellishments featured on many of the designs.
Wall Street Journal style columnist Christina Binkley wrote that the show was at times “painful,” and recalled the Flinstones when referencing one particular breastplate.
Though she “liked the perforated black leather” seen on several garments, she didn’t love the way it was used. “A vast quantity of luxury materials can’t blind people to a lack of creative marksmanship,” she wrote.
“I think that every one of the designers sitting in the front row at Kanye West must have had a deja vue [sic] moment at some point during the show,” Tweeted the International Herald-Tribune‘s Jessica Michault.
Eric Wilson from the New York Times agreed somewhat; he wrote, “it was obvious that most of the clothes suffered from a poor fit.” Women’s Wear Daily, on the other hand, was a bit kinder; it called the show “neither triumph nor train wreck” and said “it had the earnest veneer of a beginner, which was sort of endearing.”
