Will Kanye West’s Line Succeed on the Catwalk?

With his Paris Fashion Week debut a month ago, critics debate whether Kanye West’s clothing line is a legitimate attempt at establishing a fresh identity in the fashion world, or just Kanye having fun with his money, demonstrating what attending countless fashion shows and knowing the right people can do for you.

West acknowledges that being a “celebrity-rapper or rapper-designer” is “the biggest hurdle when you are trying to get people to work with you.” Ask Lauren Conrad or Lindsay Lohan how being a reality television star-designer or actress-singer-drug addict-designer, respectively, worked out for them.

Anything Diddy Can Do…

While two different gigs didn’t necessarily work out for those two, other artists have been successful at juggling more than one act: Beyoncé, Gwen Stefani, Diddy, Pharrell Williams, just to name a few. Diddy’s Sean John label has “received many awards and accolades including the prestigious ‘Menswear Designer of the Year’ for 2004 by the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA).” Pharrell Williams, along with his manager Robert Walker, and Japanese designer Nigo, created the Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream fashion labels in 2005. Beyoncé and her mother, Tina Knowles, launched House of Dereon in 2005, and in September 2011, they opened the London edition after premiering their Fall/Winter collection at London Fashion Week.

West should use the above-mentioned artists as motivation that success can happen, and that being a rapper-designer is doable. But just how did he fare in his first foray into clothing design? The consensus of Mr. West’s first show was that his clothing design needs improvement, but the context, according to Tim Blanks from Style.com, was “impeccable—soundtrack and staging exactly what you’d expect from someone whose 360-degree vision has been responsible for some of the best albums and concerts of the past decade.”

Love it or hate it?

What people did say about West’s fashion debut is that “it had the earnest veneer of a beginner, which was sort of endearing.” Others repelled his more-is-more approach, finding it not only gauche, but the materials inappropriate for the season. Mr. Blanks also wrote, “The clothes? Heavy might be the operative word: zippers in excelsis; suede and leather high-performance clothing; beading, crystals, and appliqué weighting jackets and tops. And more fur than you’d want on a night when the mercury hit the roof in Paris.”

Fame as a musician can only get you so far in the fashion industry. You have to put up or shut up, and “if the clothes don’t cut it, you simply won’t win approval of the crowd there to see it,” writes Dolly Jones of Vogue.

Still, he seems to be getting the benefit of the doubt, which is nice to see in such a fickle industry. For Kanye to earn more fashion cred, he’ll need to make sure his second fashion line gets better reviews than his first one. This will demonstrate to the skeptics that he’s improving; he’s working harder on his craft to make his clothes have their own personality and work for certain types of customers.