Tuesday, October 06, 2015

Kanye West Explains Why Fashion is the Highest Art Form Right Now

Kanye West Explains Why Fashion is the Highest Art Form Right Now:

West at Vogue Paris's 95th anniversary party. Photo: Victor Boyko/Getty Images
West at Vogue Paris's 95th anniversary party. Photo: Victor Boyko/Getty Images
While Tuesday morning brought us Paris Fashion Week's most hotly anticipated show, Chanel, it also delivered to us an interview with one of New York's buzziest designers. I'm talking, of course, about Kanye West, who joined the SHOWStudio team for a live-streamed discussion to answer questions from fans — both non-famous and big-name, like Anna Wintour and Carine Roitfeld.

As would be reasonable coming from anyone, West expressed both a great deal of admiration for the fashion industry and frustration with it. The latter stems from a number of places: the fact that people in the fashion world haven't taken him seriously as a designer because he's a celebrity, the assumption that he can't make clothes because he's a musician and the fact that it's a much harder road to make it in the business as a black man. West recalled an instance in which a stylist came up to him and Virgil Abloh, his creative director and the designer of the label Off-White, and made a comment about how Abloh was coming up to take his spot in fashion.

"Oh," West said to SHOWStudio's Lou Stoppard. "The one spot at the dinner table for the black guy?"

Still, West said, if you're born black and make it to the Met Ball or the Grammys, the odds are you've done 10 times as much as everyone else in order to get there.

But while West feels the industry hasn't yet acknowledged him fully as a designer, he had a lot of good to say about fashion. In fact, he considers it to be the highest art form at the moment — despite the fact that he thinks people in the fine art world look down on fashion designers.

Catch the full interview, below.

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