Kanye West is a disguised model at the Balenciaga Fashion Week show in Paris | Balenciaga

It took several minutes for the Paris Fashion Week audience to realize that they had just witnessed Kanye West He made his debut as a fashion model.

With his black hoodie wearing a Balenciaga baseball cap, there was something familiar about the man in an oversized windbreaker and baggy leather jeans – beard, swaying vanity – and after some zoomed in phone videosthe penny dropped: One of the most influential musicians of his generation had just added modeling to an eclectic resume of 21 Grammys, fashion collections and collaborations from Paris to New York, a longtime guest role on the Kardashian celebrity circus, and nearly missed a run for the White House.

Balenciaga has made itself the most compelling luxury brand in the world by taking the most blatant and absurd elements of Fashion Week and turning them upside down to say something interesting.

Placing a celebrity on the catwalk for a featured show is an old trick; Putting one of the world’s most famous men on his stealth show, said Balenciaga’s creative director, Demna — who, like Yi, as West now prefers to be known, has only one name — the message that people should value individuality and not condone celebrities.

In a statement accompanying the show, he said, “Individuality in fashion is reduced to false trends dictated by a pamphlet in the stories of some celebrities of the moment…Fashion at its best shouldn’t need a story to be sold to someone…let everyone be anyone.” .

If you assume fashion is all about glamor and escape from reality, you’ll have some catching up on Balenciaga. Declaring polish and perfection to be “very old school,” Dimna rocked Paris Fashion Week with spunky, miserable aesthetics.

The invitation to the show was a rickety purse, bloated with cards, coins, and receipts as if returned from a warehouse of lost possessions, complete with ID—in the name of a longtime Balenciaga employee—and a faint shot of a cat tucked away behind the metal bag. The walkway was a muddy path spraying black dirt on clothes on the catwalk and handbags in the front row, the sound of which was recorded by gunfire from a techno rumble. This was not an ambitious life moment.

This is the fashion for the BeReal era, not Instagram. Just as the Chanel runway sparkles with pearls and camellias, the Balenciaga is brimming with real-life treasures: in-ear AirPods, a ponytail-swinging house key, and designer bags on crisp, one-handed packages. (There were even what looked like children strapped to some mannequins in slings, although these were dolls.)

However, Balenciaga is still definitely fashion. Slack in jackets is the street-fashion update of eggshell and cocoon shapes that Cristóbal Balenciaga, the founder of the house, radicalized Parisian fashion in his own era, 70 years ago. The emphasis on black is not just a nod to dystopia, but the power of black to emphasize exaggerated silhouettes that is Balenciaga’s trademark of past and present.

You might have another surprise in store for Paris Fashion Week, with rumors of a catwalk show on his label Yeezy’s catwalk, but it hasn’t been announced.