(Art: iamrurik) Fashion is over. That’s what I thought–and tweeted, before thinking again–when I saw the first pics of Mr. Kanye West’s debut prt–porter collection at Paris Fashion Week last Saturday. Of course, I knew the man planned to show there, but it seemed a thing that wouldn’t, couldn’t, actually happen. Like McDonalds at the Louvre or something. Lindsay Lohan “designing” that one total horror show for Emanuel Ungaro in 2009 (incidentally, the only PFW I’ve yet attended) was different. It was still Ungaro’s name on the schedule. Kanye West is Kanye West. He is so many, apparently too many, things high fashion is not: Populist. Accessible. Massively entertaining. And black. This week, I’ve been meaning to read a lot of articles about the new Tour book, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? But I already know the answer is “not the fashion industry,” because to consider that there might be more than one kind of blackness, you’d first have to see more than one black person in a room. You think I exaggerate. Fine. Can you name one black fashion designer? Did you say Junya Watanabe? Go stand in the corner. Rachel Roy? Yeah, she’s Indian. The dude from SUNO? Those clothes look sorta African, and are beautifully designed using Kenyan textiles, but designer Max Osterweis is from San Francisco and GoogleImage doesn’t lie. Under “African-American fashion designers” on Wikipedia, twelve are listed. Three of them are dead, two of them are Knowles, and I’m pretty sure you haven’t heard of the other seven. Like the vast, statistics-defying majority of fashion people, I’m white. I don’t know what it’s like to be not-white. But I do know The Great Gatsby like it’s tattooed on my hand, and of all the self-made stars, Yeezy–not the guy actually named Jay–is the Gatsby-est. Rich, powerful, yet seeming ever the swaggering upstart, the thing he wants most is what money can’t buy. Fashion is his Daisy; it’s as fickle and beautiful and ultra-white and ultimately as illusory as she. He’s been following it for years, loving it, he once said, more than music. He’s attended countless (well, I can’t count) shows, sitting front-row and rapt. And now he’s had his own, at Paris Fashion Week, where almost no new designers, or any who aren’t white or Japanese, do runway. He turned a historic library into an ultraviolet-lit club, the Left Bank into his own Kanye West Egg. And everybody–from Anna Wintour to Azzedina Alaia–came for the party, but nobody was his friend. It was the fifth snidely negative review I read of West’s show that made me regret my tweet, or really, wish to add two words: “Good riddance.” Lisa Armstrong had been funny; Suzy Menkes did well to contrast her short and not-sweet review of West with one of a “real” young designer, Jean-Paul Lespagnard, who–in a not un-telling twist–featured more black models on the runway than West did. Christina Binkley and Eric Wilson both dissed the poor fits and unseasonal furs, which, fair enough. But the Forbes.com fashion blogger Blue Carreon was less sophisticated in his word choice, and his review seemed telling of the darker reason–beyond a lack of organic talent, formal education or respect for vaunted tradition–that West’s not wanted in Paris. “My personal take–they are clothes for Kanye’s tribe, women who have to attend the Grammy Awards in statement-making clothes that reveal a lot of skin.” Oh, sorry, are you still on the word tribe? Because yes, in describing a black man’s designs and alluding to the black female R&B singers who might wear them, that happened. On one hand, what can you expect from someone named “Blue?” On the other, you’d think “tribe” (!!!) is the kind of latently troubling word that gets deleted by any editor with a cell, even one, in his brain. By now said editors must just shrug and say “it’s fashion.” Magazines spent all summer celebrating the “tribal” trend, which I prefer to call “post-colonial” or “stupid. Only after an internet shitstorm did Vogue Italia reconsider their recent editorial spread on “slave earrings”–to go with Zara’s “slave sandals,” perhaps? British Vogue, for their part, has just produced a cover image of Rihanna in which she looks like a less tanned Jessica Alba. And on Monday in Paris, Comme des Garons showed a sort of demon-bride collection; one look had a white cloak with a white pointy head on a white (duh) model. If you’re not thinking what I’m thinking, you’re just… not thinking. Rei Kawakubo, the founding designer of CDG, is a genius. But she doesn’t have a goddamn clue. “How many “black issues” of Vogue will there be before it’s not an issue?” my great friend Kiwi Mohamed asks me, rhetorically of course, over G-chat. She’s Somali-Canadian, born in Dubai, and has worked uneasily in fashion for years (blogging for The POP, now full-time visual merchandising for Topshop Canada). “If you’re not white, you’re an anomaly. If you’re Shala Monroque [a black fashion director for GARAGE and street-style star], you’re popular because you’re dating a Gagosian.” I send her the link to my sorta-review in the Standard of David Lynch’s new Paris nightclub and fashion hotspot, in which I noted that of the 10 black people in the whole place, eight were stage entertainment. “I wouldn’t have gotten in unless I were a size two wearing head-to-toe Prada,” says she. Amrit Kumar and Mriga Kapadiya, the Toronto-Mumbai design team behind NorBlack Norwhite, have just been in Paris showing to buyers. “We were just discussing how we were the only shaded skins representing!” replies Kapadiya when I email her–they’re back in India now–for comment. “Buyers who love us, love us.” Still, she says, “the majority of buyers pass us by, noses in the air, their black ripped jeans on with studded boots.” “The idea that we ponder is that it feels like there are lots of beautiful brands playing along our lines, working with local artisans and showcasing ancient textiles and practices, but most of those companies are multinational, or their designers are not like us: they’re white!” Kapadiya says. “Just makes us think how different the overall response would be at these market weeks, if our line were exactly the same, but it was created by white people.” Kanye West, for all his money and power and supermodel friends, must feel the same way. __ Sarah Nicole Prickett is the Toronto Standard Style Critic
