KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 22 — French luxury fashion house Balenciaga has severed ties with rapper and fashion designer Kanye West following the publication of its third-quarter results on Thursday.
Parent company Kering said the French fashion house would no longer be working on projects with the artist who now goes by the moniker of Ye, who has been embroiled in multiple controversies over the last month, including anti-Semitic threats.
“Balenciaga has no longer any relationship nor any plans for future projects related to this artist,” Kering stated in a reply, in an exclusive report by WWD with no further elaboration.
Ye had opened Balenciaga’s summer 2023 show, held in a mud pit during Paris Fashion Week, wearing what looked like battle gear, including a branded mouthguard shielding his teeth, the image of which has since been removed from Balenciaga’s website.
It was his latest collaboration with Balenciaga artistic director Demna, following the launch earlier this year of their Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga line, which dropped in February in tandem with Ye’s Donda 2 experience performance in Miami.
Demna served as creative director for an earlier listening event for the album last year.
Last month, Ye terminated his partnership with Gap Inc., signalling an increasingly combative attitude that has also left his 10-year relationship with Adidas hanging in the balance.
The German sportswear firm had stated on October 6 that its partnership with the Yeezy brand was “under review.”
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2016, Ye appears to have spiralled out of control since staging a surprise YZY show in Paris that featured T-shirts with the slogan “White Lives Matter” which opened with a monologue in which he prided himself as being “unmanageable.”
Faced with violent public backlash over the show, Ye publicly attacked everyone from fashion editors to former friends and luxury mogul Bernard Arnault.
After he was suspended from Instagram and Twitter for violating the platforms’ policies on hate speech, Ye has announced that he would be buying right-wing social media platform Parler.
