Following his recent string of antisemitic and offensive comments, wealthy rapper and longtime collaborator Kanye West has officially severed ties with luxury clothing brand Balenciaga.
Following West’s contentious appearance on the podcast Drink Champs, which was broadcast last week and in which he erroneously asserted that George Floyd wasn’t murdered but rather was killed by fentanyl, Balenciaga started to distance itself from him.
West’s runway appearance from the Balenciaga Spring 2023 show during Paris Fashion Week was reportedly removed from both the Balenciaga website and Vogue Runway on October 17.
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A section on its website devoted to the three Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga collaborations, which debuted earlier this year, has also been removed, according to Balenciaga.
Additionally, other online retailers no longer carried those items.
Thursday, October 20,2022, the fashion house’s parent company Kering informed WWD in a statement that it “no longer has any relationship with this artist” and “has no plans for future projects related to this artist.”
West has lost one of his oldest and closest business partners in the high-end fashion industry with the breakup of Balenciaga. The two have been intertwined for many years, in large part because of West’s long-standing friendship with Demna Gvasalia, the creative director of the fashion house, which began around 2014, when Vestments, the brand that Demna founded with his brother Guram Gvasalia, made its mark in the fashion industry.
After consulting the Gvaslia brothers on West’s Yeezy Season 1 line in 2015, Demna was hired to lead Balenciaga by the end of the year.
In 2019, West and Demna’s romance became significantly more stable. Eventually, after a lot of texting, the two began collaborating once more, with Demna serving as the creative director for West’s Donda listening parties in 2021.
Demna said to The Times last year, “With Ye, I have something that I really don’t have with other people, where anything is possible.” “For me, speaking with him feels like regressing to the 8-year-old version of myself, when I was free of all these constraints and filters.
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