Kanye Interruptus Hits Fashion Week

His last-minute addition creates drama with another designer
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 15, 2015 10:21 AM CDT
Updated Sep 15, 2015 10:57 AM CDT
Kanye Interruptus Hits Fashion Week
Kanye West, from left, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, and Kim Kardashian chat before the showing West's Yeezy Boost shoe line for Adidas on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2015, during Fashion Week in New York.   (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

Kanye West announced on Friday that he'd be holding a show at New York Fashion Week tomorrow—at the same time Anne Bowen was scheduled to present her own streetwear collection, which is in direct competition with West's Adidas line. "You can’t compete," Bowen tells the Daily Beast. "He is Kanye West, one of the most award-winning celebutantes of our time." As a result, she had to reschedule her own show for the next day, and was left scrambling. "We have been prepping for a year for this at considerable financial, labor- and commitment-cost to our company," she told WWD over the weekend. "Our show date has been scheduled for months and has been on the Fashion Calendar for weeks. We went through all the proper channels to make this a reality. And just yesterday we learned that Kanye West is having a show at the same time on the same date as ours."

Her publicist notes that in addition to what Bowen calls a "logistical nightmare," there are cancellation fees and the whole thing is "costing us a lot of money. ... And now we have to re-invite the press. We sent out printed invites by hand, and they’re useless." They are also scrambling to line up the same models and photographers; Bowen says that one of the reasons they had to reschedule in the first place is that her models "were being pulled" from the show because "the call time for hair and makeup was going to be the same time as ours. There was just so much wasted time and energy." The president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America tells WWD West's show wasn't listed on the Fashion Calendar, and says, "The first I heard about the Kanye show was what I read in the Post. ... We can’t avoid conflicts unless we know someone’s doing it." Gripes Bowen's publicist, "Most of the designers work though the CFDA for this very reason—to make sure that they don’t step on each other and that there aren’t any conflicts." (Click to see the "daring pregnancy style" Kanye's wife has been baring at Fashion Week.)

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