“THIS is generosity!” exclaimed one reveller yesterday, really feeling the love for Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 3 Madison Square Garden extravaganza once a few tracks had dropped and Naomi Campbell had just strutted to roaring cheers. ‘Generosity’ seems like an odd choice of word, considering tickets for the show were being touted online for up to four figures and the lines for the $40-$90 merchandise snaked around the venue. 

There’s no denying though that what West orchestrated was big, to the point where hyperbole doesn’t even apply. For the fanboy punter, maybe it did feel generous. Barely two days into NYFW and fashion month’s thunder had well and truly been stolen as the most extreme form of fashion as entertainment dawned upon us. The venue? It’s unlikely to get bigger than the 18,000 capacity Madison Square Garden. The models? Who’s going to top a mostly street cast ensemble of hundreds, plus a supermodel or two like cherries on the top. The frow? The most-papped, watched and Instagram-followed were in the house, as of course were the Kardashians, dripping in white furs and crystal embellishment (created in conjunction with Olivier Rousteing, who sat with the fam). And the arbiter of all of this? Kanye and his booming laptop, dropping his much-anticipated tracks one by one with in-between commentary.

By West’s reckoning, 20,000 people were present, with probably 0.5% occupied by fashion press. “He made history by selling out a fashion show to the public,” said one fan. “He executed his vision - good for Kanye. Good for the culture.” What’s the culture? The mashing up of fashion, music and art – up for everyone to access, judge and eventually consume, be it the album, the merch or the actual collection itself. In its most extreme iteration, this was basically an apocalyptic vision of a fashion show of the future, minus the immediate shoppable product (no doubt ’Ye will eventually attempt to one up on Burberry and Tom Ford in this regard). As fashion’s establishment ponders its broken systems and out-of-sync-out-of-touch semantics, West took matters into his own hands, to speak directly to his audience. One of the spoken word tracks intoned “I love you like Kanye loves Kanye” and in response, MSG whooped. Big show. Big gesture. Big love.    

“As fashion’s establishment ponders its broken systems and out-of-sync-out-of-touch semantics, West took matters into his own hands, to speak directly to his audience”

When asked about the specifics of the show and how they felt about the installation, the reaction from the audience was decidedly woolly. “I’m not here for the clothes or the show,” said one guy, who was more fixated by the merchandise stands selling I Feel Like Pablo and RIP Donda West and Robert Kardashian tees created by Cali Dewitt. “I love Kanye – but honestly the clothes are whatever,” said another. A quick poll suggested that the majority were there to listen to the album rather than see clothes. The dancing in the stands got progressively heavier. The tracks, louder. And then the aux cable was passed around from Ye to Young Thug to Vic Mensa until MSG’s curfew time.

Still, to not parse the clothes and the set-up would be remiss. In this vast venue, where everything was multiplied and scaled up, Vanessa Beecroft and West’s vision was more pronounced than ever. You immediately thought of the jungle in Calais, as the entire cast was penned inside a dilapidated campsite. West has previously claimed that his last Yeezy installation with Beecroft was merely an aesthetic representation of Claudio Silvestrin’s architecture. Whether West acknowledges it in his shows, it’s still impossible to look at what’s underneath that giant tarpaulin, and not see a vision that is scarily becoming a reality. Where the “other” – be it Syrians on the run, Muslims smeared as terrorists and black people innocently gunned down by police forces – are static in their social immobility and lumped into clichés and stereotypes. Wearing a dishevelled uniform of rusted reds and browns and world-weary expressions (instructed by a list of now-viral posing rules that align with Beecroft’s own work), they stand disaffected and yet, weirdly defiant. Snatches of West’s more politicised lyrics (“Hands up, we just doin’ what the cops taught us / Hands up, the cops shot us”) in the background, only asserted these interpretations.

On the elevated tented podiums, the clothes were more pronounced even from a distance. Colour blocked ribbed onesies, metallic overcoats and yellow shearling jackets mimicked the colours and textures of derelict housing. Ian Connor and Young Thug’s meme-able #Bored expressions might well sum up the mood of Generation Rent. The uncomfortable dichotomy of Naomi, along with Liya Kebede and Veronica Webb in their brown mink fur coats as well as the Kardashians in their white counterparts, looming over the rest of Yeezy’s haute hobo garms felt either deliberated or mindlessly insensitive.

The deeper meanings behind the installation mostly didn’t matter to the crowd. “It’s pretty much what I expected to see,” said Ramya Velury. She understood the magnitude of it all though. “Symbolically, a rapper doing a show in MSG with adidas backing it - who has always supported hip hop from the jump – it’s really big. A fashion show mixed with an album listening party – it’s a changing of the times.”

"I told Anna [Wintour] this backstage that a dream of mine would to be the creative director of Hermès,” declared West, when the Yeezy party was beginning to wind down. Add that to his ever long plausible bucket list that also includes perhaps one day, running for President of the USA. Whatever West’s ambitions in fashion, music or world domination, he can claim to have staged the biggest fashion ‘happening’ for now. “I feel so much joy, you know, to be able to actually follow my dreams without people shitting on me and being given the opportunity to create as an artist...you all acting like this shit is regular,” goaded West towards the end of the show, when he debuted a video game featuring his mother Donda West arriving in Heaven – just to add one last surreal takeaway from this one-off occasion. Whatever your opinions about the clothes, there is certainly nothing regular about West’s creative output. It’s multi-pronged, brash, easily misunderstood and yes, generous in one sense of the word.