When Kanye West (finally) released a full lookbook of his new capsule for GAP — co-created with Balenciaga designer Demna — earlier this year, he couldn’t have picked a more inauspicious time. . Less than 24 hours later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Normally the fashion press would have been all over anything Kanye does, but fashion suddenly felt irrelevant as, understandably, it tends to do when a humanitarian crisis strikes. And yet it’s worth revisiting what a defining moment for fashion we’ve let pass us by, perhaps not entirely unrelated in its dark outlook.
Regardless of what one thinks of Ye or Demna, this release should go down in fashion history as a major step in redefining (or erasing) the semiotic boundaries between high and low, and between designer fashion, streetwear and what I call clothing – everyday wear for the masses that doesn’t require much thought.
Before we get to the design elements of the capsule, the most important thing should be noted: The collection whose images are full of edge, darkness and sheer menace was released by GAP. Let me rephrase that – it was released by the dirty mother GAP, the Olympic gold medal champion of the American center, the most insufferable and unpleasant brand to ever grace the face of the Earth. This symbol of American naivety that ruled the mall in the 90s on the back of an ad featuring a bunch of innocent whites dancing in khaki pants has been toppled in one fell swoop, making it very difficult to avoid words like ” revolution”.
Maybe not revolution, but subversion is certainly an apt term. I would have given anything to have been in the GAP boardroom when this lookbook was first launched. Visualize it – a bunch of old white dudes in khakis and tinsel shirts watching this – their Protestant brains trying to work out what exactly this all means. Yes, GAP has been on the decline for years, but it still makes a ton of money uniforming conformist America. Did they throw it all away? Will this bring about an evangelistic blow, like what happened to Converse when Rick Owens introduced his first collaboration images with a pentagram? Did they really delete their entire Instagram — even for a day — for the apocalyptic, dark vision that is diametrically opposed to everything GAP has stood for throughout its existence?
Because those images, now resurrected in a dedicated Yeezy Instagram profile, are as dark as they get dark. Demna’s work has gradually taken a darker turn in the last two years. The Balenciaga pre-fall ’22 collection that Demna showed last December – and perhaps his best – was glass and grit reminiscent of New York’s ’80s and ’90s heyday, which in its cultural perspective was light years away from vanilla joy. that GAP was doing sales at the time. It certainly reflected the darkness of our current world condition.
Bringing such a vision to the masses through the least likely channel is a fool’s errand. Whether the masses will buy it is another matter. So far, at least judging by my Instagram, Yeezy GAP customers are fashion insiders or at least people who have more than a cursory interest in fashion (and, of course, your average beast). There may be a reason for this. The silhouette presented with strong, oversized shoulders, as well as the dirty/shiny fabrics from which the garments are made, is a challenging proposition by any mass market standards. Imagine these clothes anywhere outside the streets of major fashion capitals and then imagine how ordinary people dress and it becomes clear what a bold proposition the Yeezy GAP is.
I keep coming back to the inversion, because that’s the key. In the big picture, the real fashion prize goes not to someone who wows fashionistas, but to someone who can convince the masses to reset their eye.
Which brings us back to that erasure of semiotic codes. What is the Yeezy GAP designed by Balenciaga? It is neither designer fashion, nor luxury, nor streetwear, nor mass market clothing. It’s neither a low-key collaboration of the sort pioneered by H&M and Target, nor a simple product of the famous brand tie-in a la Dior x Travis Scott. It’s everything in between. It has broken all the semiotic codes and definitions surrounding fashion now. It’s too massive for the elite, and too elite, considering the difficulty of the proposition and the price point, for the masses. But more importantly, it’s food for thought, and that’s what good design should be.
