The ice caps are melting, the pandemic carries on and James Corden continues to be at large. But hope comes in curious forms. While Kanye West may have failed in his US presidential bid (so far), he has succeeded in spicing up the grimmest month of the year with a showmance so audacious that it threatens to redefine the genre. Perhaps it was inevitable that his rebound from Kim Kardashian would be as spectacularly extra as their seven-year marriage itself (you’ll recall that West, or Ye, as he calls himself spent four days of their honeymoon editing an Instagram picture of their wedding kiss, and used the occasion of his wife’s 40th birthday to arrange for a hologram of her late father to describe him as the ‘most, most, most, most, most genius man in the whole world’).
After Kardashian filed for divorce last February, it initially seemed that West would react with the kind of divorced dad energy unseen since Fathers4Justice scaled Parliament; in December he bought a house on Kardashian’s street and the same month begged her to ‘run back’ to him during a live-streamed concert. Instead she chose dates to Staten Island and retail parks with Saturday Night Live’s walking big-dick energy, Pete Davidson. And so West embraced a fresh form of chaos.
On New Year’s Eve, West was spotted dining with Julia Fox, the Playboy model and actress best known for playing Adam Sandler’s bombshell mistress in Uncut Gems. Soon after, Fox breathlessly recounted their courtship in a piece for Interview magazine, written in the stream-of-consciousness style of a teenager’s journal, or mid-career Alanis Morrisette. ‘We decided to keep the energy going and fly back to New York City,’ she wrote. ‘Ye directed an entire photo shoot for me while people dined! The whole restaurant loved it and cheered us on’ (we’ll take her word for it). The accompanying photo story looked much like an Alison Jackson Kimye lookalike shoot, which didn’t go unnoticed by the tabloids. ‘Attack of the Kim Kardashian Klone!’ trumpeted the Daily Mail, while TMZ announced, ‘Kanye West: If I Can’t Have Kim Back... I’ll Make GF Julia Fox My New Version.’
But while the spectre of Kardashian looms large over West’s fledgling romance with Fox, another name looms even larger — that of Demna Gvasalia. The creative director of Balenciaga was a firm favourite of Kimye during their union, and the pair have continued to dress almost exclusively in his creations during their separation. Intriguingly, his clothes were also prominently featured in Fox’s Interview spread. Could Gvasalia styling West’s marriage, divorce and rebound relationship be the final frontier of sponsored content? And was it mere coincidence that the morning after Fox’s Interview spread dropped it was announced that West, who signed a 10-year design deal with Gap in 2020, had orchestrated a partnership between the high street brand and — you guessed it — Balenciaga? It certainly adds a fresh perspective to Fox’s assertion that, ‘everything with us has been so organic’.
Perhaps West and Fox’s relationship is the exact point where business and pleasure overlap on a Venn diagram. Then again, perhaps we’re giving too much credit to a man whose plan to eradicate the coronavirus included a spirited call to ‘stop doing things that make God mad’. Perhaps the whole saga has been, as writer Rachel Rabbit White tweeted, ‘post alt lit, post new sincerity it’s “life as a performance” for the girls’. Either way, at the risk of hyperbole, this is the best thing to have ever happened to me. According to Fox,
‘I don’t know where things are headed but I’m loving the ride.’ Three cheers to that.
