It took several minutes for the Paris fashion week audience to realise they had just witnessed Kanye West make his first ever appearance as a catwalk model.
With his black hoodie pulled up over a Balenciaga baseball cap, there was something familiar about the man in an oversized flak jacket and baggy leather jeans – the beard, the lurching swagger – and after some zooming in on their phone videos, the penny dropped: one of the most influential musicians of his generation had just added catwalk modelling to an eclectic CV that encompasses 21 Grammys, fashion collections and collaborations from Paris to New York, a long-running guest cameo role in the Kardashian celebrity circus, and a near-miss at a run for the White House.
Balenciaga has made itself the most compelling luxury brand in the world by taking the most vacuous and ludicrous elements of fashion week and turning them upside down 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 most famous men in the world in his show incognito was, said the Balenciaga creative director, Demna – who, like Ye, as West now prefers to be known, goes by only one name – a message that people should value individualism and not fawn over celebrity.
In a statement accompanying the show, he said “individualism in fashion is downgraded to pseudo trends dictated by a post in stories of some celebrity of the moment … fashion in its best case scenario should not need a story to be sold to someone … let us let everyone be anyone.”
If you assume fashion is all about glamour and escapism, you will have some catching up to do at Balenciaga. Demna, who has declared polish and perfection to be “pretty old school”, shook up Paris fashion week with a gritty, dystopian aesthetic.
The invitation to the show was a beaten-up wallet, bulging with cards, coins and receipts as if returned from a lost property depot, complete with ID card – in the name of a longtime Balenciaga employee – and a faded snap of a cat tucked behind the coin pouch.
The catwalk was a muddy track which splashed black dirt on to the clothes on the catwalk and the handbags of the front row, soundtracked by a gunfire rumble of techno. Aspirational lifestyle moment, this was not.
This is fashion for the age of BeReal rather than Instagram. Just as a Chanel catwalk is bedazzled with pearls and camellias, Balenciaga’s is dotted with the treasures of real life: AirPods in ears, a house key swinging from a ponytail, bags modelled on crisp packets gripped in one hand. (There were even what looked like babies strapped to some of the models in slings, although these turned out to be dolls.)
Yet Balenciaga is still most definitely fashion. The slump of oversized bomber jackets is a streetwear update of the egg and cocoon shapes with which Cristóbal Balenciaga, the founder of the house, radicalised Paris fashion in his own era, 70 years ago.
The emphasis of black is not just a nod to dystopia, but to the power of black to emphasise the exaggerated silhouettes which are a Balenciaga trademark of past and present.
Ye may have another surprise in store for Paris fashion week, with rumours of a catwalk show for his own Yeezy brand, but no announcement has been made.
