What precisely is the deal with Kanye West and his wife, Bianca Censori, whose latest very surprising red-carpet outing very unsurprisingly featured her being next-to-naked? Bianca’s husband, who dresses like a Minecraft security guard, seemed to be giving her the signal to shed her fur coat and reveal herself outside Sunday night’s Grammys, to which they don’t appear to have been invited. Certainly a hot new twist on the old 13th fairy act.
Given that Bianca is rarely photographed in anything heavier than a 5-denier sex poncho, half the internet seems to have settled definitively on the conviction that she is being coercively controlled. The other half has decided the pair enjoy the attention their “art project” is receiving. I’m not sure it’s entirely clear which is the case, or indeed whether it’s a bit of both for now, and in any case she may reevaluate her opinions about the situation in retrospect as time goes by.
By way of a recap for Guardian readers not obsessed with the byzantine court politics of Yeezy (guys, please: this stuff is important): Kanye and Bianca married in 2023, following the sundering of his union with reality-industrial-complex mogul Kim Kardashian. Bianca and Kanye seem to have met via the latter’s previously mentioned fashion brand, where she was hired as the chief architect. Stay with this, because the sneakers Kanye produces are so hideously absurd that they may well have featured mock-Tudor heel gables and Juliet balconies. Even so, being the chief architect of a fashion company does feel a little like being the chief veterinary officer of a teapot factory.
Then again maybe all virulent antisemites need a chief architect. I’m not saying Bianca was the Albert Speer of Yeezy, planning ever more triumphalist colonnaded sneakers, only for these dreams to end in rubble when the boss overreached himself. But the fact remained that Kanye’s collaboration with Adidas did end up imploding, shortly after he fired out a barrage of Jew-hate across pretty much every possible platform, appended by the explainer: “I can literally say antisemitic shit, and they can’t drop me.” Not so, as it turned out. (Maybe he read some second world war history books and wrongly assumed the old rules of the firm still applied.)
These days, the Wests stage regular silent happenings for the paparazzi, which are parsed by everyone from lip-readers to armchair hostage video experts to determine if Bianca is having fun or not. She certainly seemed to be, in an enthusiastic karaoke performance at a Grammys afterparty – but appearances can be deceptive. There’s rather more to run on this one before the world can know for sure.
For now, perhaps we have to take the word of Bianca’s tirelessly curated personal website, which is a strong pusher of the notion that she and Kanye are a mutually supportive pair of performance artists. “While many were initially fascinated by her private life,” it acknowledges of her rise to fame, “her role at Yeezy – West’s fashion brand – quickly became the focus.” Did it though?
Perhaps more luck will be had on that front now, thanks to Bianca’s announcement that she is releasing a documentary about herself this year. “The documentary will also highlight her collaborative relationship with Kanye West, focusing on how their creative partnership drives innovation across various fields. While both have kept much of their work under wraps,” it goes on, suggesting a metaphorical fur coat is about to be dropped by both Wests, “this series will offer unprecedented access to their joint creative processes, revealing how Bianca’s architectural sensibility influences Kanye’s futuristic fashion designs.” Righto. The network/streamer on which you’ll be able to view this remains tantalisingly unconfirmed. But I think I’d be more interested in it than Meghan’s upcoming tablescaping debut on Netflix, if that means anything.
In the end, though, the Kanye and Bianca show seems not a lot more than a bi-weekly occasion for drawing attention to staggering creative decline. For someone whose music was once layered and groundbreaking – and look, for someone whose architecture might well have also been layered and groundbreaking – the message of this now fairly long-running exercise in minimal dressing seems embarrassingly pedestrian, based on a somewhat teenage belief that sex is oo-er-rude and transgressive. As an art project, what is its point supposed to be? No offence, but it has about as much depth and nuance as a Banksy or late-stage Damien Hirst – in fact, it makes the actor Sydney Sweeney’s funny snap of herself in a grey sweatshirt reading “Sorry for having great tits and correct opinions” look like a Renoir.
As for where the show goes next, I have suspected for a while now that one future staging post on this provocative artistic journey will be for Bianca to appear on some red carpet or other wearing a full-body veil, while Kanye remains nice and comfy in his customary T-shirt and trousers. Should this development be realised, it’s hard to know whether people will find it offensively shocking, finally sufficiently modest, or coercive in a different manner. It’ll definitely be a lot harder for them to talk about in the “right” way than nudity is, though. In fact, judging by the full chatterati meltdown over Bianca and Kanye’s Grammys outing, the choice or otherwise of nudity remains much more acceptable to discuss than the choice or otherwise of being fully covered. Perhaps Mr and Mrs West have accidentally made an interesting point after all.
- Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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