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Yeezy Season 4 Was a Mess for Everybody Involved & That’s How Kanye West Wanted It

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Alice Chen

Yeezy Season 4 has been a mess from the start. First, there was that casting call asking for “multiracial women only,” which many interpreted as a euphemism for light-skinned women. Then, the actual show wasn’t much better—critics have called it everything from a hot mess to hell on earth. And from what we can see, those descriptions aren’t too far off.

The show took place at the Four Freedoms Park on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. In others words, it was outdoors in the middle of a 90 degree day under direct sunlight—which alone already sounds miserable. Throughout the duration of the show, models who’d been standing for hours under the hot New York sun collapsed, fainted and had to be helped down the runway from concerned audience members.

Yet according to Vanessa Beecroft, a performance artist who collaborated with Kanye on the show, the 2-hour delay that turned into an hours-long affair was done on purpose. “Everyone was in a state of meditation … The long wait before, I believe it was planned because [West] wanted the audience to get into this state of having to observe and having to stay,” she explained to Page Six. But not everybody saw it that way:

Nobody was more critical than Stella Bugbee, The Cut’s editorial director. Her series of tweets were critical—not of the collection, but of the horrifying conditions. “A model needed water. The poor models. This is cruelty,” one Tweet read. As the hours passed, the scene she painted got progressively worse. “One model just fainted,” she wrote. “But of course she tried to stand up again, because: FASHION!!”

Beecroft was quick to defend Kanye, saying, “There was food and water”—because we’re sure that was helpful sitting backstage somewhere, right? “That’s a production issue not related to me … I’m not sure why some people fainted yesterday, but in my case, when it has happened in my performances, it was the level of emotional stress,” she explained further to Page Six in attempt to take the responsibility off her and Kanye’s shoulders. “I was bothered yesterday in a sense that I’m sorry for what’s happening, but at the same time, I wouldn’t know how to prevent it if it was emotional,” she added, further trying to justify how the show went down.

We don’t know about you, but passing out after standing hours in direct sunlight isn’t a result of “emotional stress”—and pointing it out isn’t the press being “cruel,” as Beecroft says, but rather, the responsible thing to do, because models need to be treated better than this.

Though Kanye hasn’t addressed the criticism directly, he has spoken out about the experience in general. He took to Twitter (of course) to spew some ~deep~ thoughts.

So, there’s that.

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Alice is the Senior Associate Editor at Her Campus. She graduated from Emory University in 2012 as an English major and a Dance minor. Before joining Her Campus, she was an associate editor at Lucky Magazine. She is currently located in Salt Lake City, UT, where she spends her free time rescuing orphaned kittens, whose lives are documented on Instagram at @thekittensquad! You can find her on Twitter and Instagram at @alicefchen.