Kanye West Introduces ‘Donda’ To The World With Creative Direction By Demna Gvasalia

Early in the morning of 5 August 2021, Kanye West was in his bedroom at Atlanta’s Mercedes Benz stadium doing push-ups. Later on, he tucked in for a nap. Throughout the day, he invited Chance the Rapper and Demna Gvasalia over, parsed through merch options, tried on a Balenciaga autumn/winter 2020 jacket, and welcomed several models into the room, two in red Balenciaga robes and armour boots who sat ritualistically under lit candles, and then another with a bob and sunglasses who sat cross-legged and hunched over an iPhone. All this was streamed in real time on Apple Music in the lead-up to West’s second Donda listening party.

The previous event had been held in the same venue on 22 July. In the two weeks since, West has been fine-tuning not only the album, but its visuals. Some of the new aspects of the Donda 2.0 tracklist include feature spots from The Weeknd and Kid Cudi. Meanwhile, Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia has stepped in for the creative, directing the look and feel of the listening event and its stream.

What in Ye’s name are Demna and Kanye doing together? As it turns out, the two share a lot of aesthetic common ground – and, apparently, the same art director, Niklas Bildstein Zaar, who made the heaven and brimstone graphics that appeared in both the autumn/winter 2020 Balenciaga show and last night’s Donda event. Both artists specialise in creating work that finds beauty in darkness. Gvasalia’s visions of hell and high water, and his interest in artificial intelligence and deep fakes, are premonitions of moments that seem just about to happen. His garments are uncannily redone versions of “normal” things like tracksuits, dad jeans, and puffer jackets rendered to the most luxurious degree. Even his debut couture show, the most trumpeted collection of 2021 thus far, had an eerie air about it, with the restored Balenciaga salons made intentionally dingy, with grease on the light switches and yellowed hems on the curtains. With Yeezy, West has a similar mission, making “essential” items like leggings, bombers, and tees into purposeful garments with an unusual vibe, an idea he’s extending with his ongoing partnership with The Gap. And depending on what rumours you believe, they’ve even worked together in the past, either on Yeezy Season 1 or Yeezy Season 3.

The experience of West’s fashion interactions the can be polar. (And at times polarising, especially his political inclinations of late.) You either get pared back, austere, earthy Kanye (Sunday Service, the Ye listening event in Wyoming), or something over the top (the Saint Pablo tour, The Life of Pablo global merch release, that Yeezy show on Roosevelt Island). Gvasalia, in most of his Balenciaga work, prefers the atmospheric and absorbing. But tonight’s display was rawer than anything we’re used to from either artist.

Inside the Mercedez-Benz stadium, guests like Migos and Rick Ross took in an industrial set with a circular stage. On it was a recreation of West’s room at the arena: mattress, blanket, coat, shoes, stereo, candle. Spotlights and floodlights surrounded the stage while the spidercam snuck through the air; a ring of clouds or sunbursts or flames lit up the stadium’s oculus. There was little else in the mix; the space’s dirty floors and guard rails were all exposed.

West’s performance mimicked what you would have seen on the stream earlier: dressing, praying, dancing, walking. A band of street-cast performers dressed in their own black clothing bounded out to circle the stage, walking and swaying, followed later on by barefoot dancers in mud-coloured nylon tracksuits, who flung themselves to the ground in a fit of heavenly possession and trudged towards the stage. (One guy in neon orange also made a run for it from the audience, before being promptly taken down by security.) It was all quite, dare I say it, humble? Well, humbler.