Yeezy Season 3, The Divergent Syndrome, and The Future of the Fashion Show |

It is often the case that people with absolutely no money are often blessed with copious quantities of creativity, but at times can't make their dreams come true since they lack the necessary funds to develop their researches or finalise their projects. There are instead wealthy people and celebrities out there with a lot of money and enormous egos who can easily pretend of being amazingly creative minds.

Take Kanye West, for example. A supposed musical genius, producer and entrepreneur, he fancies himself also a fashion designer and a conceptual artist. Last night he descended from his cloud unto New York to launch his seventh solo album, "The Life of Pablo", and his new collection, Yeezy Season 3 at Madison Square Garden (an event simulcast to venues around the world).

We have grown accustomed to seeing a fashion show incorporating some live music performances or the favourite band of the fashion designer playing some tunes in the background, but this was considered a fashion runway with a listening party attached to it.

The event was open to the public, but, while last September Givenchy allowed 800 members of the public (among them fashion design students) to register on a dedicated site and see the show for free, this was a ticketed fashion show and music launch mainly dedicated to West's fans.

As it happens for big concerts, there were people reselling tickets outside the stadium or online, while fans could celebrate the event also by buying outside the stadium T-shirts and sweatshirts, some of them emblazoned with the words "I Feel Like Ye" on the front and "I Feel Like Pablo" on the back, the latter a line lifted from West's track "No More Parties in LA" (apparently a reference to Picasso; prices ranged between $40 and $90, so they were cheaper compared to the pieces in the Yeezy collections).

Apart from around 18,000 fans, guests included Caitlyn Jenner and the Kardashian clan, all clad in a mix of Yeezy and tacky Balmain by Olivier Rousteing's designs (apparently, the embroidered pieces were the result of a collaboration – yawn – between West and Rousteing). Matching looks abounded with more than one of them wearing white holey jumpers as mini-dresses for that fake patina of character and ostentatious fur coats.

The huge sheet covering two structures in the middle of the New York Knicks basketball court was pulled back (after some technical problems…) at the end of the first track to reveal over 1,000 models clad in the previous Yeezy collections, surrounding what looked to some people as a pair of refugee tents on top of which male and female models stood dressed in Yeezy Season 3. The staging was another collaboration with performance artist Vanessa Beecroft.

All the models preserved for the entire duration of the show (90 minutes) their bored or sad expressions; not many of them moved, though every now and then a few of them briefly sat down, as instructed by Beecroft's norms and regulations that were also posted on Twitter and that featured a series of directions (such as "No whisper/No smile/No dancing/No eye contact/No sharp movements/Loosen up no stiffness/Do not be casual/Do not act cool"), a few spelling mistakes ("If you are tired, sit down or lye down" or "Be aware of others and be percautios") and a sentence that sounded as if it had been lifted from a sci-fi film ("Do not ever look at the Jumbotron"). There was also a supermodel cameo with Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb, Alek Wek, and Liya Kebede in black holey leotards and mink coats.

If you took it all as a show filled with noise, techno and samples, this was perfectly fine, but if you were looking for clothes you probably went to search for them in the wrong place.

Though the palette was more varied compared to Seasons 1 and 2, the garments were more or less the same: athleisure such as bodysuits, hoodies and tanks; fake military clothes; tattered sweaters; cargo gear, and oversized outerwear and shearlings. Occasional new entries included super-luxe fur, stretch knits and over the knee socks. The palette revolved around fifty shades of rusty orange as favoured by the Amity faction out of Divergent (View this photo). At least, you may argue, there was diversity among the models, even though a few of them looked extremely thin.

The most annoying designs in West's collections remain his holey and tattered jumpers: some people – among them many children – actually do have to wear in their lives jumpers with real holes as they can't afford wearing anything else. Fakely distressed and torn/tattered clothes are not glamorous or elegant, they just prove that who wears them was too lazy to work or too privileged to actually have the hard life of real people (frankly, the combination of immaculately white holey and tattered jumpers/mini-skirt, furs and beaded dresses on the Kardashians looked ridiculous).

The collective images of the models and their close ups on the Jumbotron at times conjured up images of refugees escaping from their countries by boat; now if that was the final aim of the presentation, that would be extremely upsetting because a tragedy shouldn't be used for a fashion event with no real message at its core (well, there were a few models delivering here and there the black power salute, so there may have been a message that was sadly lost in all the grand spectacle…).

Music-wise West thinks he is God, but fashion-wise the rapper is locked in a Divergent syndrome (oh, wait a minute, would his family clad in white represent Candor then?) and believes the world has gone through an apocalypse, at the end of which people were divided into factions, distinguishable only by the colours of their attires.

After the album playback was finished West asked the crowd "Tell me how y'all feel about the clothes this season?" then thanked Adidas for paying for the collection, led the crowd in a chant of "fuck Nike" (he fell out with the company after a disagreement over royalties linked with his Air Yeezy footwear and West has the habit of seeing people falling off with him as dangerous enemies, be they Taylor Swift or Nike…).

During the event, West also reminded his fans why they should buy into his footwear ("…it's the number one shoe…the number one Christmas present"), and concluded his rants with a key appeal, "My dream, I told Anna [Wintour], is to at least just for a couple of years be the creative director of Hermès."

Surely the presentation – that also featured as a bonus a teaser of a video game about West's deceased mother's late arrival to heaven (entitled "Only One"; couldn't you have spared people at least this one?) – had an audio-visual impact, but, as a whole, the collection was overshadowed by the release of the album that was then overshadowed by West's rants about his collection.

If you're a fashion student severely indebted to pursue your dream and haven't lost your critical skills, you're probably wondering why you're suffering so much if the fashion industry has been infiltrated and partially saturated by such narcissistic egomaniacs. The good thing, though, is that this is certainly not the future of the fashion presentation, but a one-off. There is indeed no designer who may be able to splash so much money only for a collection presentation.

The sad thing, though, is that vapid celebrities will instead keep on existing and churn out horrid designs, collaborations and fashion collections (which will also mean you can obviously forget writing an in-depth fashion analysis, because what reasons, messages and meanings can you find in a pile of bodysuits?). There is only one doubt left: behind her impenetrable sunglasses, did Anna Wintour ever think "get me off the fashion bandwagon, NOW?". Ah, a penny for her thoughts.