Kanye/Yeezy/Ye West is a man of many facets, in music, business, fashion and, not least, in shoot-from-the-hip extemporizing. As we know, his utterances on this latter field of media play can spontaneously combust. On the personal-lifestyle front, he remains active, pictured below with his current partner, Bianca Censori, an Australian architect, (with a master’s from the University of Melbourne), who was hired by Yeezy (the company, not the man) as a designer in 2020.
Some background: Mr. West and his successive romantic partners have consistently exhibited great care in their public dress. Pictured above, a seminal shot of Mr. West with Amber Rose from 2009, at the BET Awards in Los Angeles. The intensity and scope of Mr. West’s concern for fashion detail has increased as he ascended through the ranks — an ascent fueled in no small part by his foundation of the Yeezy brand and the 7-year run of his partnership with Adidas, cancelled last October by the company in the fiery blowback Mr. West received upon making a series of inflammatory anti-semitic remarks. That cancellation, along with several other contract terminations, left a giant smouldering crater where brand Yeezy had been and quite a few million — estimates running as high as $250 million — in shoes and clothes in the pipeline, not to mention the millions that went up in smoke from the Gap and other partners, running as fast as they possibly could away from their deals with the man. It was a fashion, and a career, bonfire.
His fashion doggedness, however, continues unabated. Below, a shot from Los Angeles with Ms. Censori last May.
Socially speaking, Ms. Censori succeeds the New York It-Girl Julia Fox as Mr. West’s romantic interest. Although Ms. Censori and Mr. West are both grown people with their own well-established dress codes, they are nevertheless embarking upon a fashion odyssey all their own. However they express it, couples do form a shared visual semaphore that broadcasts the liason’s message to the street or, in Mr. West’s and Ms. Censori’s case, to the thousands of paparazzi hounding their every move.
In this shot as captured by one of those coursing dogs of the press last May, the basic elements of the West-Censori summer street kit are clear: for her, the sheer leotard/Pilates-workout look in any shade, and for him, a Renaissance-looking singlet with some skateboard/snowboard/soccer shin guards strapped over some black leggings. Notably, despite the knee-and-leg armor, there are no moon boots, or, actually, sturdy footwear of any kind, of which in his incarnation with Ms. Fox, pictured below, he had been really fond. Significantly, for such an avowed fashionista, Mr. West doesn’t seem to be wearing any shoes in the classic sense at all. Rather, it can be that he has on a pair of socks, or perhaps his leggings come with feet. All in all, he looks like he could be playing a minor role in a Two Gentlemen of Verona production set in the 2050s.
Of those coursing dogs of the press, the most avid on the newlyweds’ scent are from Britain, which has a sort of old Empire-driven logic, because, for better and for worse, Britain’s press barons view Ms. Censori’s Australian heritage as making her one of their own.
In the Ye cosmos, no move or phenomenon should come as a surprise. So, a few short weeks after Mr. West and Ms. Censori were reported to have been married in what has been described as a “secret” but which seems more likely to have been just a private, Beverly Hills ceremony in January 2023, they were reported, also, to have honeymooned luxuriously in Utah. Still in possession of one of his Wyoming ranches, Mr. West has a known penchant for seeking downtime in the great American West.
Below what we might call a moon-boot or at least a “secure-form-of-footwear” parade with Ms. Fox at the Paris fashion shows last year.
To the extent that Mr. West can ever approach what ordinary mortals would consider a modicum of rest and recreation, he often does so in Europe. Summer 2023 is no exception. He has been spending some seemingly easy days with Ms. Censori in Italy.
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