The below essay is from i-D’s “CONFESSIONAL” zine, created in collaboration with Substack. The limit-edition print product is available free of charge and features ten never-before-told confessions by Substack creators. Just like this one.
The fries are transcendent, sure. But the vibe? Undeservedly smug. The crowd? Sceney, but soulless. A coven of foul energy vampires, sucking down each other’s cigarette smoke under dim red lights, draped in anything money can buy. People come to be seen, to shit-talk over €30 martinis, and to pretend that the aggressive exclusionary politics of the place is a kind of Parisian charm. It isn’t. It’s just racist—macro and micro—and exhausting. But on this particular October morning (date redacted to protect the guilty), I acquiesced.
Why? Because it was breakfast, and my nemesis—the host-slash-manager of this cursed establishment—doesn’t work mornings. And, again, the fries.
Five minutes into my very professional meeting with my very professional Italian client, I very unprofessionally picked up my unmuted phone to check a flurry of notifications. The first was from my colleague Mark Guiducci: “Are you okay?”
Then came many more from many others—from Julia Fox. From… Offset? How the fuck did Offset get my number? From my sisters. What time even is it in LA?
I opened Instagram because I have a Pavlovian compulsion to do that anytime I have one second of unaccounted time or my phone is, simply, in my hand. And there it was.
What an oddity to discover the artist formerly known as Kanye West absolutely DUNKING on me on main. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. My trauma response is to downplay everything. Even now, I imagine my own tragic demise featuring the phrase, “Lol, oh my god, you guys, it’s fine…” as the light fades from my eyes. I could chalk this up to being part of a family that’s endured more than its share of sudden loss, but it’s more likely my generalised anxiety and devotion to avoidance. (Growth moment: identifying that both/and of this paradigm! Healthy stuff is happening in this essay!)
“This is not a fashion person,” he had written beneath the absolute worst photo of me that exists. “I know Anna hates these boots.”
But even more damaging than the jab was how quickly I internalised it. I scanned his words like they were gospel, looking for truth. Because with surgical precision, he’d found the exact spot I was softest: my imposter syndrome. The thing that haunts me even now, after years in this industry.
That I don’t belong. That I never did.
That my presence in this space is a mistake. That the quirks and textures that make me me—being fat, not skinny; Black not white; frizzy not flat-ironed; wearing a quirky collage of the only clothes that come in my size—are not just unremarkable, but disqualifying. That I looked like someone who didn’t matter.
I adore posing for photographs—in addition to “Everything happens for a reason” my most oft-repeated mantra is, “I will never be as young and hot as I am today,” and I want to capture it so the evidence lasts long after my memory fades.
The gag is, I did look sloppy that day. I was in the Place Vendôme, so I must have either been running from a Schiaparelli appointment or a meeting at the Ritz, and one lone street style photographer sheepishly approached. The art of a street style photo is trying to look effortless while simultaneously trying very hard to look good and cool—it’s an art I’ve never tried to master and in this moment, it showed. But it looked like she mustered some courage to ask, and I hate to say no…to literally anyone…Big people pleaser over here. Instead of explaining this, and running from her lens, I stood half-in and half-out of the moment, with a half smile and half a brain cell. The picture stinks: my fraying chenille Wales Bonner skirt just grazing the top of my throwback high-heeled Timb boots, tongue askew, laces barely tied, sunglasses smudged with what I can only assume was croissant butter residue from my fingertips. I was in a rush and under a hangover.
I must’ve stared into my phone in a catatonic state for minutes, because by the time I blinked, my client was asking for the check before we’d gotten our coffees. We hadn’t spoken for about 15 minutes, my head was in the clouds, and all I could say to him was “Kanye is trolling.” Not sure that quite translated to an Italian ear. I paid the bill (which was disproportionate and insulting, as always—DID I MENTION I HATE THIS PLACE?) and reopened my phone.
Eva Chen, omnipotent Head of Fashion at Instagram, had texted a warning: the fanatical Yeezy hive was rising, an eerie foreshadowing of the death threats that would come.
All of this… over a T-shirt.
Not one cut perfectly by The Row and justifying a three-figure price tag, one that challenged the semiotics of a slogan—one that was stained in pseudo-satire.
The day before, I had begged PR Consulting and the Lucien Pages team for a ticket to the secret Yeezy show. As ever, Ye had turned the industry feral. When he summons fashion, we come frothing. If you weren’t there, you weren’t in the know. If you weren’t in the know, you had no social capital. And if you had no social capital… were you even in fashion?
The show started over an hour late—and no one left. Unheard of.
And then: a spectacle of quiet violence. An agit-prop performance drenched in thinly veiled contempt for Black life. A stage for slogans weaponised against the very communities that built him. A humiliation kink come to life. I watched, sick to my stomach.
Later, I posted on Instagram. As I do. I expected a chorus of rage. But the industry at large, ever allergic to discomfort, said nothing. Silence and apathy reigned. My post hung in the void. Alone. Easy to spot.
After several days of pick-up—and a bit too much attention than was comfortable for my colleagues—at the behest of my boss, I agreed to meet him. The venue would be the newly acquired Yeezy Headquarters—as close to a corporate high-rise you could get besides the Arc De Triomphe.
What followed felt like the opening scene of a Jon M. Chu movie. I showed up flanked by a motley crew of unlikely allies: a Vogue Paris administrative executive, Baz Luhrmann, Paloma Elsesser, and her publicist. I knew I needed buffers, and more people than you’d think said, “No.” But the gang I managed to gaggle together put on a pretty tough show. I’m convinced we could’ve nailed a choreographed dance battle if it came to it.
On the other side: photographer Hugo Comte, a half-dozen faceless handlers, and yes, bigot supreme Candace Owens (no way she could stay on beat, we definitely would have won the dance battle). The whole thing was insane. Minutes after arrival, the standoff started. Candace has absolutely no live juice—wack as hell. Came out the gate hot and ready for a fight, which was curious because she has absolutely no hands. Unfortunately, she didn’t realize that I STAY ready to rumble and have the kind of left hook that would paralyse Hilary Swank… intellectually speaking. Right off the bat, the vibe was combative. None of that safe space mumbo jumbo. Someone was getting spanked and it wasn’t going to be me. Ye is a talented mediator—maybe because he is capable of commanding stadiums. When he speaks, the room falls silent. Within minutes, everyone was out. Only he and I and our respective documentarians (mine recording, artfully, for legal purposes and his for who knows?) remained. He talked. I mainly listened, interjecting every so often to remind him that he picked the wrong one. It was frustrating, and my people-pleasing reared its ugly head a couple of times.
I can’t say that the meeting was productive. I can’t say I understand his choice to make that shirt anymore. What I can say is that somewhere between the folding chairs and the folded arms, I remembered:
I sat through over two hours of madness. I won’t share all the details, but locked somewhere in the Condé Nast corporate vault is a feature-length iPhone film, directed by an Oscar winner, capturing every moment of the madness. #ShotOniPhone, baby.
The cinematography? Probably award-worthy. The dialogue? Impossible to script by even the best screenwriter in the world.
What did I learn? That language is a weapon. That silence is a choice. That sometimes you become the story because you refuse to be erased. That T-shirts can crumble an empire, hurt the cause, and also my feelings.
And above all else: that I can never go back to Hotel Costes. Not even for the fries.
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insaneeee post, I was hooked all the way through
this story is so intense, i had to force myself to remember that this actually happened to a real person. wow i didn't know he brought out candace owens... and you brought out baz luhrmann?