Early in the morning of August 5, 2021, Kanye West was in his bedroom at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium doing push-ups. Later on, he tucked in for a nap. Throughout the day he invited Chance the Rapper and Demna Gvasalia over, parsed through merch options, tried on a Balenciaga fall 2020 jacket, and welcomed several models into the room, two in red Balenciaga robes and armor boots who sat ritualistically under lit candles, and then another with a bob and sunglasses who sat cross-legged and hunched over an iPhone. All this was streamed in real time on Apple Music in the lead-up to West’s second Donda listening party.
The previous event had been held in the same venue on July 22. In the two weeks since, West has been fine-tuning not only the album, but also its visuals. Some of the new aspects of the Donda 2.0 tracklist include feature spots from The Weeknd and Kid Cudi. Meanwhile, Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia has stepped in for the creative, directing the look and feel of the listening event and its stream.
What in Ye’s name are Demna and Kanye doing together? As it turns out, the two share a lot of aesthetic common ground—and, apparently, the same art director, Niklas Bildstein Zaar, who made the heaven and brimstone graphics that appeared in both the fall 2020 Balenciaga show and last night’s Donda event. Both artists specialize in creating work that finds beauty in darkness. Gvasalia’s visions of hell and high water, and his interest in artificial intelligence and deep fakes, are premonitions of moments that seem just about to happen. His garments are uncannily redone versions of “normal” things like tracksuits, dad jeans, and puffer jackets rendered to the most luxurious degree. Even his debut couture show, the most trumpeted collection of 2021 thus far, had an eerie air about it, with the restored Balenciaga salons made intentionally dingy, with grease on the light switches and yellowed hems on the curtains. With Yeezy, West has a similar mission, making “essential” items like leggings, bombers, and tees into purposeful garments with an unusual vibe, an idea he’s extending with his ongoing partnership with the Gap. And depending on what rumors you believe, they’ve even worked together in the past, either on Yeezy season one or Yeezy season three.
The experience of West’s fashion interactions can be polar. (And at times polarizing, especially his political inclinations of late.) You either get pared-back, austere, and earthy Kanye (Sunday Service, the Ye listening event in Wyoming) or something over the top (the Saint Pablo tour, The Life of Pablo global merch release, that Yeezy show on Roosevelt Island). Gvasalia, in most of his Balenciaga work, prefers the atmospheric and absorbing. But tonight’s display was rawer than anything we’re used to from either artist.
Inside the Mercedez-Benz stadium, guests like Migos and Rick Ross took in an industrial set with a circular stage. On it was a re-creation of West’s room at the arena: mattress, blanket, coat, shoes, stereo, candle. Spotlights and floodlights surrounded the stage while the Spidercam snuck through the air. A ring of clouds or sunbursts or flames lit up the stadium’s oculus. There was little else in the mix; the space’s dirty floors and guardrails were all exposed.
West’s performance mimicked what you would have seen on the stream earlier: dressing, praying, dancing, walking. A band of street-cast performers dressed in their own black clothing bounded out to circle the stage, walking and swaying, followed later on by barefoot dancers in mud-color nylon tracksuits, who flung themselves to the ground in a fit of heavenly possession and trudged towards the stage. (One guy in neon orange also made a run for it from the audience, before being promptly taken down by security.) It was all quite, dare I say it, humble? Well, humbler.
That humanity comes straight from the album, which is arguably West’s most ambitious and personal project to date. A tribute to his late mother, Donda continually references their relationship, his own struggles as a father and husband, and his new life amid a very public divorce. West, who is so Chicagoan he named his kid Chicago, was actually born in Atlanta. Somewhere past the stadium’s walls, in the smoggy urban sprawl is where he shared his first moments with his mother. At the end of the event, he was harnessed and lifted up hundreds of feet in a beam of light, trying, I imagine, to reconnect to her in some cosmic display. It was unquestionably his most direct statement of intent, his clearest artistic expression, in a long time.
It was also the most fluid marriage of music and fashion in a long time. There was no forced co-branded merch or cheeky music cues to coordinate to a runway. Instead the show treated sound and style with equal importance, the aesthetics of the album complementing the visuals, and vice versa. Not since the gilded, Riccardo Tisci days of Watch the Throne has an album paired so perfectly with a look.
Will the West-Gvasalia post-hardcore, streamlined cultcore catch on? It may take some time. The stadium, smelling of joint smoke and smoke machines, was filled with guests in big logo tees, skinny jeans, and tighter than tight dresses with giant cut-outs. It’s easy to posture—both West and Gvasalia have done that. But their message tonight seemed to be: Do less to do the most. Let’s see if the idea holds as the fashion world preps for its first in-person fashion month in a year and a half. If not, West’s cherry red Yeezy Gap jacket just went on sale and will be sure to turn some heads.
Source
Vogue
Date Published
January 31, 2022
Author
STEFF YOTKA