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The Agony and the Ecstasy of Yeezy Season 4

by Christian Hansen

September 8, 2016

The Milgram experiments, which began in 1961 at Yale, studied human’s willingness to inflict pain on other people. The experimenters instructed subjects to administer high-voltage shocks on another participant — that participant was, in fact, an actor. Even as the actor began banging on walls and screaming, more than half of participants obeyed orders to increase voltage.

I was reminded of Milgram’s study at Kanye West’s Yeezy Season 4 show, watching a model with a broken stiletto boot perilously limp down the runway. It took everything her limbs could muster to simply keep upright, and as she inched forward, the crowd stood with mouths agape. The question on my — and, I imagine, everyone’s — mind was: Should I intervene before her ankle snaps? Or should I follow orders and behave as one does at a typical fashion show?

Yeezy Season 4’s mood was, overall, apocalyptic. Mostly, this seemed intentional. There was the dark, dissonant music, somewhere in between a La Monte Young drone and a horror-movie soundtrack.

There were young, streetcast black and brown women in increasingly sweat-drenched bodysuits. The hot sun blared down on the models — this all took place in a public park on Roosevelt Island — while guests including Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, Anna Wintour, and Pharrell watched from scant patches of shade. (At one point, one of the models fainted, poor thing.)

And then there was the sheer magnitude of the event. Fashion shows are typically 15 to 30 minutes long. Yeezy Season 4 lasted four hours. It began at 1:30 p.m., when guests boarded shuttle buses on Manhattan’s West Side (cabs weren’t allowed near the entrance to the park) and ended at 5:00 p.m. The clothes in the show were — as in previous seasons — mostly beige, cream, and black, in either oversized or body conscious silhouettes. Parkas, sweater-bralets, and off-shoulder hoodies were all paired with the aforementioned boots, wobbly on more than one occasion.

Past Yeezy shows have positioned themselves as performance art. At Yeezy Season 3 in February, extras were instructed to channel Rwandan refugees in distressed, neutral clothes, as West debuted tracks from his latest album. That show, like yesterday’s, was billed as a work by visual artist Vanessa Beecroft. Prior to becoming West’s chief collaborator, Beecroft was represented by gallerists including Jeffrey Deitch and Larry Gagosian.

Was yesterday’s show art? Capitalism? Sadism? The line seems hard to draw. Eventually, one man did intervene to help the wobbling model. As she limped off the runway, leaning on his shoulder, the crowd applauded. — Alice Hines

Read more from our adventures at the Yeezy Season 4 show (and beyond) at NYFW.

Photos by Christian Hansen for the Village Voice

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The Agony and the Ecstasy of Yeezy Season 4

by Christian Hansen

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