Kanye West wants us to be gentle

Kanye West revealed his ladies wear collection at Paris Fashion Week a couple of days ago, to snorts of derision. They were fair enough snorts, to be honest: some of the designs would have shamed a contestant on the first week of Project Runway.

What's amusing, though, is Kanye's apparent awareness that he was pushing substandard clobber:

"Thank you for anybody that didn't believe, because they motivated us to break our boundaries... We don't know what the reviews will be, we don't know what they will say... I gave you everything that I had.

"This is my first collection. Please be easy. Please give me a chance to grow. This is not some celebrity s**t. I don't f**k with celebrities... The amount of people that tried to get me a celebrity f**king deal. They said, 'You need to do boot-cut jeans, or you won't sell.' Shut the f**k up!...

"I thank anybody who came to this party, everybody who supported, everybody who believed, because people thought it was a joke, and maybe people still do, but I can only grow from this point."

Not some celebrity shit, Kanye? Really? How many other designers have their first fashion show at Paris Fashion Week? And if you know it's so bad you have to issue a plea to be "given a chance", maybe you should be doing what everyone else has to do, and take the "chance to grow" while at fashion school, showing your early work in the more gentle climate of a term-end show.

If you're going to shove actual designers out the way, waving your famous face as the shortcut pass, at least have the decency to take the bad reviews on the chin. Being to be given a chance because it's not something you've got experience of doing is really a roundabout admission that you shouldn't be there.

[Thanks to Michael M]