Is the Fashion World Done With Kanye?

“That’s a little like inquiring, ‘Are you planning to visit an abusive friend?’” says the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan when asked whether or not she’ll attend Kanye West’s NYFW runway show on February 15. In the days leading up to Yeezy Season 5, Givhan is still undecided. On the one hand, “There’s always a search for something new and exciting, and in that sense, Yeezy is part of the fashion story. We want to know what he’s going to do,” she says. On the other hand, well, where do we begin? Last year, the fashion world came down hard on West’s Yeezy Season 4 runway show, widely viewed as an unmitigated, scene-stealing disaster. Held in Roosevelt Island’s Four Freedoms Park (which elicited praise for its symbolism but grumbling for the schlep) the show was delayed for hours, and models began to faint under the blistering sun. “His audience and his models were leaping through hoops,” says Givhan. And as for the fashion? It was “bad, then worse. It was boring,” she wrote at the time. Another fashion editor, who commented for this story anonymously, put it simply: “I’m done with him,” he said. But that didn’t seem to matter last week when the announcement of Yeezy Season 5 became the industry’s favorite headline. “Is he the Trump of the fashion world?” jokes Hollywood Reporter’s senior fashion editor Booth Moore, who is both interested to see what West does and feels a professional responsibility to attend and cover the show. “You can’t ignore a newsmaker,” Moore says. Read more at The Cut.