Balenciaga Parts Way With Ye!
Balenciaga has officially cut ties with Kanye West following the rapper’s string of antisemitic and offensive remarks.
Following West’s inflammatory statements on the Drink Champs podcast last week, Balenciaga has begun to distance itself from the rapper. West had claimed that George Floyd wasn’t murdered, but killed by fentanyl, and made additional antisemitic remarks. On Oct. 17, Balenciaga released a statement saying that West’s runway look from Balenciaga’s Spring 2023 show at Paris Fashion Week had been removed from Vogue Runway, as well as the Balenciaga website.
By severing ties with Balenciaga, West has lost one of his most longstanding and close partners in the luxury fashion industry. The two have been intertwined for years, largely due to West’s longstanding relationship with the fashion house’s creative director Demna Gvasalia, which dates back to around 2014 when Vestments— the label Demna founded with his brother, Guram Gvasalia— first broke into the fashion world. In 2015, the Gvasalia brothers consulted West on his Yeezy Season 1 line, and by the end of the year, Demna was appointed to head up Balenciaga.
The rapper, who was diagnosed in 2016 with bipolar disorder, has appeared to spiral out of control since staging a surprise YZY show in Paris that featured T-shirts with the slogan “White Lives Matter” and opened with a monologue in which he prided himself as being “unmanageable.”
Balenciaga also announced that it had taken down a section of its website that was dedicated to the three Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga collaborations from earlier this year. Those items are also no longer being sold by any other online retailers.
The decision was revealed by Balenciaga’s parent company Kering, which said in a statement to WWD: “Balenciaga has no longer any relationship nor any plans for future projects related to this artist.”
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