It was a few minutes after 10 pm on Thursday night at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta and Quavo was polishing off a gorgeous plate of wings. He had just smoked a perfect blunt that filled his VIP box with the scent of paradise, and posed for his inner circle in a black nylon artillery vest and stomper boots. His fellow Migo Takeoff was hidden beneath a camo balaclava and heaps of ice. They were surrounded by a retinue of friends-slash-iPhone photographers, several of them in balaclavas too, and a posse of women with incredibly au courant butts. Quavo’s warcore vest and Offset’s face mask were testaments to the all-encompassing influence, fashion and otherwise, of the man they—and 40,000 other attendees—were there to see: Kanye West.
By that time, Kanye had famously spent the previous two weeks living in a performatively modest cinderblock room in the bowels of the stadium, sleeping in a twin bed mattress on the floor with a white comforter and few furnishings. He was there to finish his album Donda, which he initially intended to release following an event in the same arena on July 22. This was his second go at the listening party, and the most immediate difference between this evening and the one he hosted two weeks ago was the involvement of another fashion figure who’s basically monymous: Demna. West has known Demna Gvasalia since the designer’s early Vetements days—he practically discovered the Balenciaga boss , championing him before nearly anyone else in the fashion industry and recruiting him into the Yeezy design studio for Season 1—but they seem to have grown much closer in the past few months. After DMX’s death in April, the two collaborated on a T-shirt that raised a million dollars for the late rapper’s family. That made them think they should do more together, those close to the pair say. West attended Gvasalia’s Balenciaga couture debut in early July, and in the meantime, West and Gvasalia have been speaking at length about West’s new album’s themes: protection, generally, and his late mother Donda, specifically, who died in 2007 and for whom the album is named. Last weekend, West’s camp announced that Gvasalia would creative direct the event, bringing his fashion finesse to Kanye’s latest spectacle. (Team Kanye offered to fly GQ to Atlanta for the night. The trip was, as Peter Schjeldahl once described the procedure of limo-to-private jet travel for Art Basel Miami, “like being poured from one glass into another.”)
Gvasalia is a designer who embraces the power of image on a grand scale, seeing magnetic menace in the ubiquitous. (Over the past few days and then while performing, West wore a striking, spike-covered jacket that Gvasalia showed in early March 2020 in Paris. At the show, the first few rows submerged—a terrifying comment on global warming or the inevitable decline of fashion’s elite staged on the eve of the pandemic.) West has a similar proclivity for grand visual gestures, but gets there by turning his most intimate psychodrama into art. Still, Gvasalia thinks a lot about Westian themes: religion, outsiders, crowds, uniforms. Clothing that everyone wears or that, despite lacking any cogent symbolism, means something to almost everyone. And in some ways, they’re approaching the same issues from precisely opposite ends of the spectrum: West is figuring out how to dress the world with an auteur’s hand, making his high fashion connoisseurship somehow populist at the Gap, while Gvasalia exploring how the world dresses through a high-fashion lens, yanking populism’s fashion codes, like baggy suits and blue jeans, into the couturier’s salon.
Kanye's ascetic bedroom set.
BFA / Courtesy of YeezyFashion is a language of immediacy, and Gvasalia brought a new urgency to West’s work, closing the gap between the divorced dad performance art of the past two weeks and West’s poetically erratic public persona. For the 24 hours leading up to the event, West live-streamed a feed of his bedroom and its visitors, touted by Apple Music as “Kanye West finishing his new album Donda.” (The album did not materialize Friday as planned.) The full possibilities of his makeshift space were on display, and it was frankly electrifying: he was the monk reducing his belongings to necessities in pursuit of a higher power; he was the divorced dad who hasn’t gotten around to buying furniture or even a bedframe. He was the prisoner serving time for his indeterminate crimes. He was the artist whose tiny studio sparks collaboration and eleventh-hour genius. (Social media users seem to think they’re getting one over on the world by comparing the room to a jail cell or broken man’s bedroom when that is precisely West’s point—a mind-stifling reaction that Gvasalia’s work is often subjected to, as well.) At one point Gvasalia popped in with his husband, the French musician Boychild, and West’s private chef brought them wheatgrass shots. West was a frequent presence, doing bicep curls and pushups, that classic hobby of the damaged man with a new sense of commitment. He posed in that spike-covered jacket; he checked out his new merch. He danced for two women wearing red Balenciaga gowns, one in the brand’s suit-of-armor boots from the Fall 2021 video game collection. It was as if Marina Abramovic was directing an adaptation of the meme page “Kanye Doing Things.”
Finally, around 10:30 on Thursday, the lights went down and the show began. West walked onto the stage: a bare platform that echoed his cinderblock chamber, with just a mattress on the ground with a gray comforter strewn across, plus a few pairs of shoes and his spike-covered jacket. An ascetic’s essentials.
The titular track boomed. In the stands, Chance the Rapper plunged his fist high in the air and sang along. He knew every word.
It was hard not to think back to the last time Kanye did something like this. But if 2016’s Life of Pablo, which debuted with a similar fashion-fueled fanfare at Madison Square Garden with instantly collectible T-shirts by Cali Thornhill Dewitt, sealed the next few years as the age of the blockbuster T-shirt in fashion, Gvasalia and West have signaled that we are now in the era of the puffer. Both figures treat the garment as emblematic of our moment. At one point, West picked up the comforter on the mattress and slipped it over his shoulders to reveal it was a floor length puffer, stalking around the stage like an unwelcome demon. Gvasalia’s couture show turned puffers into pinnacles of high fashion craftsmanship. And of course, West’s debut piece for the Gap is a puffer. Customers have gotten the memo. Just the day before the concert, former Gap CEO Mickey Drexler, who’s apparently a longtime West consigliere, said in an interview that West’s first Gap puffer drop racked up $7 million in sales overnight, which translates to roughly 35,000 puffers—or enough for almost everyone in the stadium that night. Conveniently, the red colorway West debuted at his last Atlanta listening event dropped at midnight. The preorder site is its own piece of internet art, requesting a bevy of sizing information and placing users in a “waiting room” to buy. (Gap CEO Mark Breitbard, cool and TV-handsome, praised West’s “obsessive, obsessive attention to detail,” while a rep for the brand added that the puffer, which ships in winter, feels “like butter.”)
The fashion show, Gvasalia knows, has always been theatre of the highest order, and he was in his element choreographing mobs of people around provocative sartorial statements. The album is a tribute to West’s mother, but this is also West’s divorce album. Earlier in the evening, his estranged wife Kim Kardashian West posted a photo of a bondage hood mask, zippers over the eyes and mouth, with a Balenciaga label—a his and hers couture gimp mask, a sweet if unusual show of support. But also a brilliantly uneasy explanation of their relationship: two people in a constant state of objectification, both submissives, a pair with no dominant. West put “DONDA” on a T-shirt with a cross embedded inside a pentagram—spicy stuff. And on a bulletproof vest, which he and his dancers took as a uniform: his adoring and adored mother’s name on the quintessential symbol of state-sponsored violence. It was a masterfully provocative use of fashion, something to turn over and over in your head, but ultimately resistant to a single interpretation. How does West think about protection and oppression, about maternal power, about the women in his life? In other words, the vest was a quintessential Gvasalia symbol.
West, ascending.
BFA / Courtesy of YeezyStill, this wasn’t a fashion show so much as the latest manifestation of West’s talent for organizing groups around some ineffable energy force—a fascination that began with his collaborations with visual artist Vanessa Beecroft, and continued with his Sunday Services. This performance lacked Beecroft’s heavy, aloof hand—this was something more literal. Of course, that’s the primacy of fashion, though what makes Gvasalia a singular genius is his operatic comfort with ambiguity amid almost oppressive messaging. There were fires of hell and clouds of heaven (courtesy of longtime Gvasalia Collaborator Niklas Bilstein Zaar); a bevy of monks marched in and circled around West, while a huge crowd of dancers in black circled around them counterclockwise. The inner circle moves one way but the followers go another: a freaky summation of the fashion industry’s cyclone of influence and power, and perhaps the music industry’s too. During “Never Abandon Your Family,” in which West sings about “losing my family,” a thin sea of barefoot stragglers in purply-brown nylon suits wandered like zombies, then fell to their hands and knees and crawled through the churn of dancers and monks. West was laying on the bed, then knelt on the side in prayer. His discarded jacket sat behind him like a dyspeptic sea urchin. His estranged wife sat some three hundred feet away in her Balenciaga bondage suit, her hands covered but her face exposed, her eyes masked behind wraparound sunglasses and one of her daughters in her arms. (Just as the Migos were dressed in deference to Kanye, a woman in a nearby box with rib-length black hair and a baby on her hip was photographed by scores of teens in the stands above; when the lights went up, it turned out she was some other anonymous glamazon.) The audience was pure Atlanta hip-hop, but the scene was shot through with Gvasalia’s gnarly Eastern European dictatorial overtones. This was perhaps the truest and purest expression of West’s interests and public persona we’ve seen in years.
As the album coasted to its close, West sang over and over, “We gonna be okay.” Then, a song called “No Child Left Behind”: “He’s done miracles on me.” And suddenly the rapper was ascending into the open oculus of the stadium, hundreds of feet in the air, his palms and legs splayed like Christ rising into heaven. It was a visual so genius in its obviousness that only a fashion designer—or two—could have thought of it. Before the stadium lights even went up, Quavo and Offset were already out the door, off to touch the hem of West’s bulletproof vest.
Kanye, ascending.
Gunner Stahl / Courtesy of Yeezyhttps://ift.tt/3jzG1Hr
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