So what is he planning for New York Fashion Week, where his show would be one of the most anticipated on the schedule, to further capitalize on his particular moment?

Nothing.

“I have something to say, but I am not quite ready to say it,” he said. So he is sitting this one out. Simple as that.

Not really. Really, it is not simple at all. It is a gamble, with a business, a name and a cause. He may want to use his moment to signal that he is not interested in playing by the rules of what increasingly seems, to many small and under-resourced independent designers, an unwinnable game. That instead he wants to change the rules, in the same way that he wants to use his brand (which he likes to refer to as “an art project”) to rewrite establishment histories and “end the erasure of minorities and people of color.”

Because, he said, “the purpose of design is to solve problems, and I think I have figured out how to use this tool to solve this problem.”

But whether he can actually do it, or whether fashion (and the fashion consumer), with its notoriously short memory and obsession with New! and Hotter! will simply move on, is another matter.

The Big Risk

“It’s clearly a risk,” said Steven Kolb, the chief executive of the CFDA, who was one of the judges who awarded Mr. Jean-Raymond the Fashion Fund prize. “He doesn’t see the need to be chained to a traditional idea of a designer business. Whether he’s right, I don’t know.”

Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, recently met with Mr. Jean-Raymond. She heard him out, he said, and then asked if he was worried about losing his momentum. He told her no.

Not that he is oblivious to the issue of timing. He knows it is important because he has experience with what happens when you get it wrong.

Last month, sitting in a duplex penthouse in Paris, he said, “2015 was hard.” The apartment, just down the street from Jean Paul Gaultier’s atelier, had floor-to-ceiling windows with views over the city.

It sounds glamorous, and it was, kind of, but it was also an A‌i‌r‌b‌n‌b‌, and Mr. Jean-Raymond and his four-person team were sharing the apartment. The elevator was so tiny that only one or two people could fit in it at a time, so there was a lot of stair climbing.

In 2015, he said, “people weren’t ready.” He was referring to a collection he had created around the Black Lives Matter movement and police shootings. It included a 12-minute video about racism in America that generated a lot of buzz, but also a lot of controversy.

“I was really invested in it,” he said. “We gave front row seats to the families of the victims.” That meant some editors got seated in the second and third rows, and some of them got mad and didn’t come. “Then a bunch of our stores dropped me,” he continued. “I got death threats.”

That collection almost capsized the brand before it began. Mr. Jean-Raymond was struggling to buy his business back from an investment partner after a relationship had turned acrimonious. He was selling off his furniture to raise money. “By September 2017, I had nothing left in my apartment,” he said. “I had eBay-ed everything.”

Then the Reebok deal, in which he created a Pyer Moss for Reebok sports-meets-fashion capsule line as well as sneakers, came through — it was a two-year contract — and he had enough money to take control again.

Still, when he was laying on his couch, unsure if he had a future, he was also figuring out exactly what his brand would stand for if he ever got it back. That’s when he conceived a collection drama in three acts, one that would put African-Americans back into the center of the national myths they’d been written out of. He would address social issues through the deceptively accessible wormhole of fashion.

The first act was the Western, and the second was the leisure class, but the third won’t be unveiled until September, when Mr. Jean-Raymond will also move in part to a see now/buy now schedule. That was why he was in Paris: to sell the first part of what he calls Collection 3. (Sitting this season out also means that he preserves the mystery of those clothes so they will seem new when they hit store floors.)

“It’s a question of priorities,” said Laurent Claquin, the president of Kering America (Kering is the French conglomerate that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, among other brands) and Mr. Jean-Raymond’s Fashion Fund mentor. Mr. Claquin said they had extensive discussions about the show question before Mr. Jean-Raymond decided to opt out this season.

“He has a limited team and budget,” Mr. Claquin said. “A generation ago a young designer would never make that choice, but he’s not a kid out of art school.”

Mr. Jean-Raymond also discussed the choice with Reebok, since he had incorporated the Reebok collection into his shows.

“The social impact was above expectations,” said Matt O’Toole, the president of Reebok, referring to the audience the collaboration reached on social media. Presumably, that may be a reason for Reebok to encourage him to continue with the runway.

But, Mr. O’Toole said, if Mr. Jean-Raymond was comfortable skipping the show, Reebok was, too. “What was clear is that there is purpose behind what he does, because there is purpose behind his brand,” he said.

Here’s the bet: When everyone is watching your every move, having to fake up some meaning just to satisfy a public date on a calendar may be worse than saying nothing at all.

When Everyone Wants a Piece of You

Mr. Jean-Raymond’s studio, which is on West 27th Street right across the street from the Fashion Institute of Technology, does not really look like the studio of a designer who is having a moment.

It is relatively small — a narrow space with two racks for clothes, a big banana palm tree, two small couches and a nook for work and an office (Mr. Jean-Raymond’s) with a desk and a fancy bike that was a gift from a project. He still has a very small team, 10 people, most of whom are not formally trained.