Can Balenciaga Break With Kanye?
The fashion brand and the rapper have had an intense love affair. But after Ye’s White Lives Matter shirt and antisemitic comments, the company may need to be heartless.
By
Vanessa Friedman
Oct. 14, 2022
In all the noise that has been generated by and about Kanye West, or Ye, as he is now known, over the last 10 days — ever since he disrupted Paris Fashion Week with a new YZY show, then disrupted his show with a
“White Lives Matter” T-shirt, then embarked on a public flood of attacks against anyone who dared to criticize his message that then escalated to antisemitic screeds on
social media and
Fox News — one voice has been particularly deafening.
In its silence.
Balenciaga, the brand whose show Ye opened on Oct. 2 with a surprise modeling appearance; the brand he collaborated with during his
ill-fated Gap adventure and whose
Yeezy Gap Engineered by Balenciaga products can still be found on store shelves; the brand whose designer, Demna, has described texting with Ye several times a day and who attended the YZY show with Cédric Charbit, Balenciaga’s chief executive, has not said a word about his statements. Even as Ye’s posts and avowals have become
evermore incendiary.
As Serge Carreira, a lecturer on the luxury industry at Sciences Po university in Paris, said, “the whole industry is, in a way, guilty of complacency.” But when it comes to Ye, in thrall to his celebrity and codependent relationship with fashion, it is Balenciaga with which Ye has conducted the most enduring affair.
Up until now, that has worked to both of their advantages. Ye gave Balenciaga the aura of relevance and a new audience; Balenciaga provided the high-fashion embrace Ye craved. Together, they became a viral sensation. For Balenciaga, however, it could turn out to be a very dangerous liaison indeed. Not to mention a case study on the problems of mixing business and friendship as disparate creative worlds meld into one.
Adidas, whose almost 10-year partnership with Yeezy has been extraordinarily lucrative for both sides (even though he has publicly criticized the company and its executives) has issued a statement acknowledging their past work together but noting the partnership is “under review.” They are probably why
Instagram and Twitter have locked Ye’s accounts, why
JP Morgan has apparently stepped down as the Yeezy company’s banker and why Balenciaga’s failure to respond is particularly striking.
This is especially so in the context of social and cultural changes over the last five years, in which luxury brands have issued apology after apology for repeated missteps, lest they be seen as condoning prejudice or perpetrating a history of elitism and racism. (Balenciaga is owned by Kering, the French luxury group, which is a public entity.)
“I can only assume many people are wrong-footed, confused and possibly waiting — hoping? — for an apology of sorts,” said Luca Solca, a luxury analyst at the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. But, he continued: “This reminds me of John Galliano. I see a one-way street implication.”
fired after a drunken antisemitic rant in a Paris bar, and who was later subject to a court trial (in France, inciting racial hatred is a crime), fined and forced out of fashion until he had gone through rehabilitation and made years of amends.
But therein lies the rub. In a typical ambassadorial arrangement between brand and celebrity, a famous person is under contract to be the “face” of a label, which could mean appearing in company advertisements or simply wearing its products on the red carpet. But the relationship between Ye and Balenciaga — which is really the relationship between Ye and Demna — is a complex mix of muse, collaborator, customer, fan, friend and celebrity that has been stewing for over seven years. It is more akin to a creative romance than any sort of professional agreement.
According to one insider, Ye has been known to refer to himself as Demna’s straight husband. And, as with any marriage, it is possible the Demna-Balenciaga-Ye connection is so intertwined and interdependent that they are not sure how to disentangle it.
(Multiple calls and emails to the brand were not returned.)
Ye and Demna met not long after Vetements, the upstart fashion label led by Demna and his younger brother, Guram Gvasalia, began to make waves in Paris in 2014. The label shredded the old codes of beauty and couture with a jolt of furious energy that caught the eye and imagination of Ye, who began talking up Vetements, and especially Demna, to anyone who would listen — including editors at Vogue.
Ye then enlisted both brothers to consult on Season 1 of his Yeezy brand, which made its debut at New York Fashion Week in February 2015. Only a few weeks later, he sat in the front row at a variety of Paris Fashion Week shows, including Dior, in a hoodie bearing the Vetements logo.
Ye and Demna shared a semi-apocalyptic aesthetic made to challenge the sacred cows of luxury and a sense of themselves as outsiders come to rewire the power structure of an antiquated industry for the era of the street. Not long after Demna was named the creative director of Balenciaga in late 2015, Ye, in the ultimate fox-in-the-henhouse move,
tweeted “I’m going to steal Demna from Balenciaga.”
The New York Times in 2021 as “a very intense creative exchange” that took place mostly over WhatsApp and text messages. “For me, talking with him is like going back in time to the 8-year-old me who doesn’t have all these barriers and filters,” Demna told The Times. “And those kinds of conversations help me to evolve as a designer.”
Ye became a regular front-row presence at Balenciaga shows, and rumor had it he was the brand’s biggest customer. He had the Balenciaga/Crocs boots. He had the face mask. He had the destroyed denim jacket. He was there at Demna’s couture debut. This year, he put
his customer profile on an Instagram story showing that he had, at that point, spent more than $4 million at Balenciaga in 2022 (in the years before that, not so much).
In turn, Demna is one of the only people whose opinions Ye trusts. As Demna told The Times, he was brought into the Gap deal in early 2021 in part to provide “reassurance” to Ye — he had released only two garments in 18 months — “so there could be a moment of letting go” and a full collection could actually appear.
In July 2021, Demna agreed to art direct Ye’s “Donda” stadium experiences, first in Atlanta and then in Chicago, using his vacation time to do so. In between, he escorted Ye’s estranged wife, Kim Kardashian, to the Met Gala. (She wore a Balenciaga wedding gown to the first “Donda” event and has appeared in various Balenciaga ads.) When Ye started dating Julia Fox earlier this year after he and Ms. Kardashian split, he posted
videos of himself shopping perhaps for her in a Balenciaga store. The two men went mononymous around the same time.
It all culminated in Ye’s runway appearance as the opening model of the Balenciaga “Mud” show this month, which was seen as a viral triumph, according to Mr. Carreira. At least until Ye “turned abruptly into an outcast, putting his former blind disciples in an uncomfortable situation,” Mr. Carreira said.
It may be that Balenciaga is simply hoping that, in the current climate of short attention spans and regular social media scandals, the Ye controversy will soon be drowned out by someone else’s transgression, and the spotlight will pass them by.
It could be they fear Ye’s wrath, which often involves attacks and reposting private conversations in public, more than they fear social reprisals. His general position is that you are either on his team or not. It could be that Demna is unwilling to abandon a man who has both inspired and supported him.
But an individual standing by a friend in private is not the same thing as an executive at a public company incurring serious reputational risk by standing by a flamethrower in public. There are actually three entities in this particular dalliance: Ye, Demna and Balenciaga-the-brand. Their interests may not align. Someone may have to break up with someone.
“They need to make up their mind quickly, I would say,” Mr. Solca, the luxury analyst, said.
