Cast your mind back to your Year 10 work experience placement. The majority of us spent the time procrastinating on our phones while working in a local fish restaurant, primary school, or stapling documents at our Dad’s office.
When it came to our CVs and job applications, however, those weeks were the golden nuggets to helping us embellishing our skills. For example, 'tidying the kitchen' quite easily became ‘creating a new filing system for the office’, while ‘taking coffee orders’ soon transformed into ‘being instrumental in keeping up team morale’.
Unfortunately for Kanye West, it appears he’s failed to learn the subtle art of lying the cr*p out of your resumé.
During the conversation, West (among other things, like calling slavery a ‘choice’) tweeted out an interview by The Breakfast Club’s radio personality Charlamagne Tha God.
In the clip, he let slip that he and his collaborator, menswear artistic director at Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh, pretty much did sweet FA during a work placement at Fendi.
In the interview, West landed the mother of all blows to fashion students hoping for an opportunity in the industry when he joked: ‘We interned at Fendi but we ain’t do sh*t. We ain’t get to do nothing. We were just happy to have a key card.’
Proof that it really is all down to who you know, right?
The producer then went on to discuss a trip he and Abloh took to Japan to learn more about the fashion world. He revealed: ‘We were doing JPEGs in Japan, we were making photoshop so much and not making clothes, we started joking about the JPEGs...
‘We couldn’t figure out how to actually make the clothes, so we’d just do it in photoshop. And Virgil became the fastest photoshop artist that I have ever met in my life.’
Don’t worry guys, we’re sure all the fashion greats – Christopher Kane, Erdem, Karl Largerfeld etc – all started out by making funny JPEGs on their laptops…
Discussing famed fashion universities such as Parsons in New York and Central Saint Martins in London, West said that Abloh educated himself from the School of Donda (Abloh was appointed the creative director of West's company, DONDA, in 2012).
‘And I hear people talk about "Oh, he ain’t go to school. Oh, we went to school, all right”,’ said West.
In 2012, Kanye West announced a new initiative on his Twitter account: DONDA. Named after his late mother, DONDA would be a 22+ division company with broad, overarching ideas like ‘products and experiences that people want and can afford’ and goals ‘to marry our wants and needs’.
Kanye, what we need right now is for you to ‘sssh’.
Katie O'Malley is the Site Director on ELLE UK. On a daily basis you’ll find Katie managing all digital workflow, editing site, video and newsletter content, liaising with commercial and sales teams on new partnerships and deals (eg Nike, Tiffany & Co., Cartier etc), implementing new digital strategies and compiling in-depth data traffic, SEO and ecomm reports. In addition to appearing on the radio and on TV, as well as interviewing everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Rishi Sunak PM, Katie enjoys writing about lifestyle, culture, wellness, fitness, fashion, and more.
