Kanye West offers a fashion show within a show

ADAM TSCHORN, Los Angeles Times

In the front row, in a hoodie from his collection.

Another day, another outfit along the runways, and many of the pieces are from his own collection called Pastelle.

By Adam Tschorn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 6, 2008

ON DAY 1 of Paris Fashion Week, Grammy-winning rapper Kanye West was kicking it in the front row at Louis Vuitton, kitted out in a teal T-shirt, khakis and a denim jacket accessorized with a Michael Jackson button and a chunky red Lego heart. What appeared to be a silk LV scarf billowed from his back pocket.

On Day 2, West was wading through the human stew outside Kris Van Assche and Junya Watanabe in a gray notch lapel blazer and red pocket square. On Day 3, the look was brown leather with a crisp black detachable hood and slim-fitting gray dress shirt buttoned up to the chin and a pair of spotless white Vans lace-ups.

West was a front-row fixture throughout the week, popping up at almost a dozen shows, and queuing up with the hoi polloi, instead of scurrying in and out Anna Wintour-style, amid a scrum of security guards.

Of course, each day West made a sartorial statement of his own. But none as strong as on Day 4, when he turned out to the Dior Homme show in a zip-front hoodie with shoulder patches and a red-, yellow- and pink-striped hood topped with a shark fin. The hoodie -- and as it turned out, many of the pieces he wore during the week -- were from his own, long-awaited clothing collection, called Pastelle. And we'd been witness to a kind of show within a show.

"I like the experience of it -- it's like a festival," he said of the Fashion Week scrum, during a particularly lemming-like shuffle in which this reporter found himself suddenly vest to West outside the Lanvin show. "Everybody out here fell in love with clothes at some point in their life. . . . I'm soaking in every bit of information that I can."

Which can only mean one thing: It can't be too long before West ends up taking a bow in front of a Fashion Week crowd instead of being just another face in it.

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