For those of you not in the know, the Paris Fashion Week is currently underway in France and Kanye West was there to debut his first collection. Don’t ask me why he got into fashion because I have no friggin’ clue, but let’s hope he’ll stop at fashion design and won’t get into car design or something more serious. Anyway, talking about his spring/summer collection, the rapper said:
“I had a lot of ideas about colors and shapes I wanted to express [and] I’m really happy where I ended up,” he told Wilson at the Times. He also said his “biggest hurdle” in getting the right folks to work with him was “the whole idea of a celebrity-designer or a rapper-designer.”
Now of course, I’m not a fashionista so I can’t judge the merits of his attempt, but apparently critics hated his collection with such a passion that they slammed it as soon as the first model hit the runway. The bastards didn’t even let him finish!
“Good thing Kanye West has a day job.” – Christina Binkley, Wall Street Journal
At the other end of the spectrum was French designer Jean Paul Gaultier, whose collection was described by critics as brilliant and ravishing.
Out of curiosity, I looked up some photos from the two collections to see if I could spot the alleged monumental differences between them. Unsurprisingly, other than the different styles I didn’t see much of a difference, and if I would have looked at them without knowing that one is designed by a fashion veteran and the other by a complete novice, I wouldn’t have known it.
To illustrate my point, can you guess which of the pieces below was designed by Gaultier and which was designed by Kanye? It should be an easy guess given that one is absolutely “horrible” and the other is “brilliant.”
If you guessed that Kanye’s s**tty design is the one on the right, you’re correct! Or are you… (the truth after the jump)
No, you’re not! Kanye’s design is the one on the left.
And that’s why the fashion industry is nothing but superficial nonsense.
