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If there were ever an audience primed for the cuckoo rigors of performance art, it is followers of fashion. Who understands duration better than those for whom enforced passivity is an occupational hazard? Who is more at home with the punishments of an indefinite wait?

Is there another group that could be so eager to watch what, in the end, was a bunch of models parading around in the hot late-summer sun wearing anoraks, fleece off-the-shoulder T-shirts and clear stiletto-heeled vinyl knee boots a pole dancer would kill for that they’d be willing, at last-minute notice, to follow this game plan?

Sacrifice four hours from a workday to jump on a bus that crawls through midday traffic for an hour to reach remote Roosevelt Island. Stand in the blazing sun as assistants instruct them to move from one line to another. Be admitted at last to a park designed by Louis Kahn, one of the gods of American architecture, a place that is also a national historic shrine dedicated to Franklin D. Roosevelt, where they are encouraged to mill around and bide their time until. …

Finally, roughly three hours after departure, they are encouraged to take seats on metal benches under allees of little-leaf linden trees and serve as spectators for a performance-slash-installation devised by the banally modish artist Vanessa Beecroft, of roughly 100 beautiful black women arranged in silent static rows, wearing taupe-colored leotards and standing as still as statues.

This was the Yeezy 4 show designed by Kanye West, an artist (and he is an artist; as he is the first to remind you, he went to art school) whose ego is probably his most perfect creation. If sometimes Mr. West’s productions can seem like a case of elephant giving birth to mouse, he still deserves credit for colossal ambition, good politics (the Four Freedoms park is consecrated to Roosevelt’s belief in freedoms from want, from fear, of worship and of speech and expression) and what must be superhuman energy.

After all, the Yeezy 4 show — underwritten by Adidas, which manufactures his phenomenally successful sneaker line — was far from the only thing that Mr. West had to concern himself with during a week when on two consecutive nights at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, he deployed deeply imaginative stagecraft to refashion that tired hulk of an arena into a space module, himself performing afloat on a stage that hovered above a mosh pit filled with fans for whom he is as much prophet as rapper, designer and celebrity booty call.

Yes, Kim Kardashian was at the Yeezy 4 show. She appeared with her cover-girl half-sister, Kendall Jenner, at 4:16. That was exactly 76 minutes after the appointed start time. Mr. West was seen pulling in at 3:06. The makeup team wheeled its trunks up at 3:15. La La Anthony and her son arrived concurrently with Jonathan Cheban — separate cars, please — Ms. Kardashian’s 42-year-old reality television BFF, at 3:25.

By then a crowd had gathered that included Carine Roitfeld; her former longtime collaborator, the Harper’s Bazaar editor Stephen Gan (now ostentatiously avoiding each other after a professional breakup); retailers like Tom Kalenderian from Barneys New York, Bruce Pask from Bergdorf Goodman and Laure Hériard Dubreuil of the Webster; top editors from Vogue, GQ, InStyle, Glamour and various other American mass-market organs that have — perhaps grudgingly, perhaps eagerly — capitulated to the click-bait metrics of the Kimye phenomenon.

It was, to use fashion parlance, a moment. A soundtrack droning away reminded one of the piped-in effects at the Watermill Center benefit in the Hamptons in August, for which Mr. West was announced as a headliner and then failed to show up. Several of the performers standing in the hot sun slumped.

“It was, like, who was going to faint first?” Ms. Dubreuil said.

That, too, is an unacknowledged part of performance art and of fashion shows, where participants are sometimes set tasks exceeding human capacity.

Consider that the performance piece, having gone on so long that it was not clear to observers whether there would be a fashion show at all, was succeeded at last by the start of a runway presentation.

Like all fashion shows, it was a blank episode best understood as part of a larger cultural narrative. Not much occurred, or so it seemed until a young model walking a runway that was, in fact, Kahn’s sculpture covered over with vinyl padding, suddenly could be seen staggering, almost crippled by the stiletto-heeled boots.

It was one of those instances of reality asserting itself forcibly into these contrived situations. Hobbling, slumping, the poor young woman stopped at several points along the way to find balance and recompose herself. Who can recall what she had on? Who cares? What focused everyone’s attention was her fragility, the humanity of this person unable to move forward, or backward, hindering the progress of the models piling up behind her, trapped.

A funny thing then happened. Someone from the audience — it was Mr. Pask of Bergdorf Goodman — broke what you might call the fourth wall and leapt up from his seat. He put his arm around the young woman to support her. The two of them walked to the end of the runway to hearty applause from the crowd.

“She said, ‘I think I’m going to pass out,’” Mr. Pask said later as the crowd made for the exits and the buses or the aerial trams back to Manhattan. “I told her: ‘Don’t worry, honey. Just hold on to me. It’s going to be all right.’”