From staging an off-schedule show at New York Fashion Week to incorporating ambiguous political statements into his collections, Kanye West has risen to become one of fashion’s more mysterious operators. And now the rapper slash fashion designer has released a silent film about Yeezy Season 2, his most recent clothing line.
Beginning with the text “THIS DOCUMENTATION HAS NO SOUND” superimposed on a blank screen, the film offers a silent behind-the-scenes view of the collection, from its inception to its execution. The absence of sound is a stark change from the show itself, which was set to a new song with Sia. Perhaps the creative polymath is now trying to draw a distinction between his music and his fashion?
Today also marks the drop of Yeezy Season 1, which hits stores globally from October 29. While the Jackie Nickerson-lookbook was leaked earlier this year, this is the official launch of the collection that West describes as the world’s first “solutions-based” clothing line. “I don’t want the clothes to be the life,” he says in the press release. “I want the clothes to help the life.”
The musician goes on to say that his utilitarian and seemingly military-inspired clothes are for a “modern jet-set couple”, that he “wanted something that felt like New York or Paris or Tokyo or Santa Barbara or Chicago—a worldliness and an ease” and – explaining the curve-hugging pieces in the women’s collection, “This is a challenge to where fashion is currently—a new feminine ideal.”
This comes less than a month after the debut of Yeezy Season 2 at a surprise show at NYFW which saw Instagram It-boys Luka Sabbat and Ian Connor, rising star Michael Lockley, Bella Hadid and Kylie Jenner hit the runway.
While the show was read by some as a statement on race, this is something he resolutely denied in an interview with Lou Stoppard for SHOWstudio describing it as a “moving expressionist painting” and saying that “the assumption that my artistic expression of clothing has something to do with race or politics... is racist in itself.”
Head here to watch the Yeezy Season 2 film.
