Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

How did Kanye West influence the curation of fashion?

8 Jun 2022 · 1 min

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In this excerpt, the speaker explains how fashion curation has shifted from a top‑down model dominated by haute couture houses to a trickle‑up process driven by street‑level creators. They reference Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “The Cool Hunt” to illustrate how trend scouts now look to grassroots scenes. The speaker highlights Kanye West’s role in discovering Virgil Abloh, who in turn elevated underground streetwear designers and internet‑native brands such as Hidden New York, Furniture Archive, and New Bottega, demonstrating the new bottom‑up curation model.

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And the answer is like, it's curators all the way down. The example that I give is fashion used to be curated top-down from these big couture houses. And over time, you've started to see how fashion has become kind of trickle-up. And I used a lot of this from a piece that Malcolm Gladwell wrote called The Cool Hunt, which is sort of like investigating the process of looking for new trends at street level. And you can see it happening today of like, For example, Kanye West kind of scouted Virgil and brought him up. And in turn, Virgil would find all of these people who were on the ground floor curating and creating and doing things either online or offline in streetwear. And he would bring those up. And you see fashion instead of becoming top-down, it really was becoming trickle-up. And you see people curating from the bottom. You also start to see the emergence of like real internet-native brands. Yeah. So like some of my favorites are like Hidden New York, Furniture Archive, New Bottega.