It took several minutes for the Paris fashion week audience to realise they had just witnessed Kanye West make his first ever appearance as a catwalk model.

With his black hoodie pulled up over a Balenciaga baseball cap, there was something familiar about the man in an oversized flak jacket and baggy leather jeans – the beard, the lurching swagger – and after some zooming in on their phone videos, the penny dropped: one of the most influential musicians of his generation had just added catwalk modelling to an eclectic CV that encompasses 21 Grammys, fashion collections and collaborations from Paris to New York, a long-running guest cameo role in the Kardashian celebrity circus, and a near-miss at a run for the White House.

Balenciaga has made itself the most compelling luxury brand in the world by taking the most vacuous and ludicrous elements of fashion week and turning them upside down in order to say something interesting.

Putting a celebrity on the catwalk to get a show noticed is an old trick; putting one of the most famous men in the world in his show incognito was, said the Balenciaga creative director, Demna – who, like Ye, as West now prefers to be known, goes by only one name – a message that people should value individualism and not fawn over celebrity.

In a statement accompanying the show, he said “individualism in fashion is downgraded to pseudo trends dictated by a post in stories of some celebrity of the moment … fashion in its best case scenario…