Kanye West is a chastened man. With his Roosevelt Island show of last September widely considered a debacle, he booked Pier 59 this season, agreeably changed slots when his show overlapped with a fellow designer’s, and started fairly close to on time today. Still, West doesn’t like to do anything small or predictable, so while we may have been in a familiar show venue, he rewrote the show formula, presenting his collection via giant live video projections before the models did a finale loop. While cycling through all the looks this way was somewhat slow-going and repetitive, it arguably proved a useful way to size up the collection; it was certainly a far better experience than squinting to see the clothes from the bleachers at Madison Square Garden, as we did a year ago.
Yeezy has changed in the interim. West introduced denim here, and it looked cool: high of rise, loose-ish of fit, and tucked into knee-high boots in a way we haven’t seen in a while. Halima Aden stood out amongst a diverse group of her model peers in a long faux fur coat and her own hijab (in 20 years of watching runway shows, that was a first). And West launched a new sneaker. But probably the biggest development is that where he once played down the branding aspect of this label, West is now embracing it, stamping some sweatshirts with Calabasas, others with Lost Hills, the name of a collaborative album he’s making with Drake, and still more with Adidas’s signature triple stripes. It’s a give-and-take: Those pieces are bound to sell like wild fire, but the logo free-ness of earlier Yeezy collections was a key distinguishing—and elevating—feature. Now, Yeezy looks more like its competitors in the getting-more-crowded-by-the-minute streetwear market.
That might not matter, considering the man behind the brand. West himself is surely the unique selling point of Yeezy. That’s a fact he has yet to truly capitalize on, at least when it comes to New York Fashion Week. This afternoon he opted not to come out from behind the black curtain to take a bow. This, when all anyone wants is to get in a room with him, chastened or otherwise, and hear him riff.
