He posed in that spike-covered jacket he checked out his new merch. West was a frequent presence, doing bicep curls and pushups, that classic hobby of the damaged man with a new sense of commitment. (Social media users seem to think they’re getting one over on the world by comparing the room to a jail cell or broken man’s bedroom when that is precisely West’s point-a mind-stifling reaction that Gvasalia’s work is often subjected to, as well.) At one point Gvasalia popped in with his husband, the French musician BFRND, and West’s private chef brought them wheatgrass shots. He was the artist whose tiny studio sparks collaboration and eleventh-hour genius. He was the prisoner serving time for his indeterminate crimes. For the 24 hours leading up to the event, West live-streamed a feed of his bedroom and its visitors, touted by Apple Music as “Kanye West finishing his new album Donda.” (The album did not materialize Friday as planned.) The full possibilities of his makeshift space were on display, and it was frankly electrifying: he was the monk reducing his belongings to necessities in pursuit of a higher power he was the divorced dad who hasn’t gotten around to buying furniture or even a bedframe. And in some ways, they’re approaching the same issues from precisely opposite ends of the spectrum: West is figuring out how to dress the world with an auteur’s hand, making his high fashion connoisseurship somehow populist at the Gap, while Gvasalia exploring how the world dresses through a high-fashion lens, yanking populism’s fashion codes, like baggy suits and blue jeans, into the couturier’s salon.įashion is a language of immediacy, and Gvasalia brought a new urgency to West’s work, closing the gap between the divorced dad performance art of the past two weeks and West’s poetically erratic public persona. Clothing that everyone wears or that, despite lacking any cogent symbolism, means something to almost everyone. Still, Gvasalia thinks a lot about Westian themes: religion, outsiders, crowds, uniforms. At the show, the first few rows submerged-a terrifying comment on global warming or the inevitable decline of fashion’s elite staged on the eve of the pandemic.) West has a similar proclivity for grand visual gestures, but gets there by turning his most intimate psychodrama into art. (Over the past few days and then while performing, West wore a striking, spike-covered jacket that Gvasalia showed in early March 2020 in Paris. Gvasalia is a designer who embraces the power of image on a grand scale, seeing magnetic menace in the ubiquitous. The trip was, as Peter Schjeldahl once described the procedure of limo-to-private jet travel for Art Basel Miami, “like being poured from one glass into another.”) (Team Kanye offered to fly GQ to Atlanta for the night. Last weekend, West’s camp announced that Gvasalia would creative direct the event, bringing his fashion finesse to Kanye’s latest spectacle. West attended Gvasalia’s Balenciaga couture debut in early July, and in the meantime, West and Gvasalia have been speaking at length about West’s new album’s themes: protection, generally, and his late mother Donda, specifically, who died in 2007 and for whom the album is named. That made them think they should do more together, those close to the pair say. After DMX’s death in April, the two collaborated on a T-shirt that raised a million dollars for the late rapper’s family. West has known Demna Gvasalia since the designer’s early Vetements days- he practically discovered the Balenciaga boss, championing him before nearly anyone else in the fashion industry and recruiting him into the Yeezy design studio for Season 1-but they seem to have grown much closer in the past few months. This was his second go at the listening party, and the most immediate difference between this evening and the one he hosted two weeks ago was the involvement of another fashion figure who’s basically monymous: Demna. He was there to finish his album Donda, which he initially intended to release following an event in the same arena on July 22. By that time, Kanye had famously spent the previous two weeks living in a performatively modest cinderblock room in the bowels of the stadium, sleeping in a twin bed mattress on the floor with a white comforter and few furnishings.
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