The increasingly tumultuous world of fashion, politics and commerce exploded this week with Adidas finally severing its lucrative business association with Kanye West or ‘Ye’, as he likes to be known.
West’s recent, and vile, anti-semitic remarks were the trigger for Adidas to act, but the rapper has been a loose cannon for a while now, palling around with Donald Trump and the MAGA’s and verbally attacking his former wife Kim Kardashian on Twitter.
He’s also been thrown off both the Instagram and Twitter platforms for his various badmouthing of others – including a US Vogue fashion stylist – and sending out incendiary White Lives Matter t-shirts in his own fashion show in Paris last month, to name just a few.
West was dropped by his bankers, eschewed by fashion house Balenciaga (he worked closely with its designer Demna Gvasalia) and has been given the heave-ho by Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
But everyone was playing along until last week – he walked the Balenciaga runways just last month, and US Vogue posted a glowing review of his own collection. It certainly took a long time for the fashion world to decide that he was persona non gratis, because if they are making money the fashion world will turn a blind eye to a lot.
Fashion has always been full of big dollars and big egos. But as traditional media and talented designers take a backseat to celebrity followings to make the big digital numbers required to make McKinsey and the CFO happy, the waters are even more muddied.
I always found it strange that Kanye West wanted to dominate the fashion scene, when he had such huge credibility as a musician. West’s fashion collections were never very desirable and sending out distressed hooded sweatshirts and bike pants with eye-watering price tags didn’t turn out to be particularly revolutionary or helpful to anyone.
His Yeezy deal with Adidas was certainly hugely successful and his sneakers hit the exact target audience, making him a billionaire on paper, but as this whole sad incident is played out even self-appointed genius ‘Ye’ must realise that everybody in fashion is inevitably disposable. Especially if you spout hate speech.
Former Dior designer John Galliano, although a far superior fashion talent than West, essentially went down the same path as West in 2011 when he was recorded making antisemitic remarks while drunk in a bar in Paris.
Why is it that these pampered, wildly rich and out of touch elites end in a place where they spew the most hateful rhetoric imaginable, for no reason except their own bloated unchallenged egos?
Even a world as shallow as fashion has its limits, although one wonders why Balenciaga and US Vogue took so long to come round about someone who once remarked that slavery was a choice, but profits are profits.
There are fans that think West is too much of an icon to be cancelled, and that all of his revolting comments are some form of prescient provocation we don’t yet understand, but maybe the conveniently blinkered fashion world would be better served if it went back to being about selling lovely clothes and not attaching itself to celebrity cults.
