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Kanye West model incognito at the Balenciaga show at Paris Fashion Week | Balenciaga

October 2, 2022

It took the Paris Fashion Week audience several minutes to realize that they had just seen Kanye West make his very first appearance as a model on the catwalks.

With his black hoodie pulled up over a Balenciaga baseball cap, there was something familiar about the man in an oversized bulletproof jacket and baggy leather jeans – the beard, the wavering swagger – and after a few zooms on their phone videos, the penny fell: One of the most influential musicians of his generation had just added catwalk modeling to an eclectic resume that includes 21 Grammys, fashion collections and collaborations from Paris to New York, a longtime guest role in the Kardashian celebrity circus and a near miss in a race for the White House.

Balenciaga has established itself as the world’s most compelling luxury brand by taking the most meaningless and ridiculous elements of fashion week and turning them around in order to say something interesting.

Putting a celebrity on the catwalk to get a show noticed is an old trick; putting one of the world’s most famous men on his incognito show was, said Balenciaga creative director Demna — who like Ye, like West now prefers to be known, has only one name — a message that people should value individualism, not flatter fame.

In a statement accompanying the show, he said, “Individualism in fashion is downgraded to pseudo-trends dictated by a post in the stories of a celebrity of the moment…fashion at the best of times shouldn’t don’t need a story to be sold to anyone… let everyone be anyone.

If you assume fashion is synonymous with glamor and escapism, you’ll have some catching up to do at Balenciaga. Demna, who said polish and perfection were “pretty old school,” rocked Paris fashion week with a gritty, dystopian aesthetic.

The invitation to the show was a battered wallet, bulging with cards, coins and receipts as if returning from a lost and found depot, complete with ID – in the name of a long-time employee. Balenciaga date – and a faded snap of a cat tucked behind the coin pocket. The catwalk was a muddy track that splattered black dirt over the clothes on the catwalk and the purses in the front row, accompanied by a rumble of techno gunfire. Ambitious lifestyle moment, it was not.

This is the fashion in the era of BeReal rather than Instagram. Just as a Chanel show is dazzled with pearls and camellias, Balenciaga’s is strewn with real-life treasures: AirPods in the ears, a house key dangling from a ponytail, bags modeled on packages crackers seized in one hand. (There were even what looked like babies attached to some of the models in slings, though these turned out to be dolls.)

However, Balenciaga is still very trendy. The oversized bomber slump is a streetwear update of the egg and cocoon shapes with which Cristóbal Balenciaga, the house’s founder, radicalized Parisian fashion in his day, 70 years ago. The emphasis on black is not just a nod to dystopia, but to the power of black to emphasize the exaggerated silhouettes that are a Balenciaga hallmark of past and present.

You may have another surprise in store for Paris fashion week, with rumors of a runway show for her own brand Yeezy, but no announcements have been made.