Fashion house Balenciaga — for which Ye posed with a high-fashion boxing mouthguard — has dumped the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. Among other reasons, Balenciaga's decision came after the GOP hero's most recent antisemitic remarks, which were spewed in a Tucker Carlson interview (which Fox tried to hide), in a Chris Cuomo interview, and on Twitter and Instagram (posts that were pulled by the platforms).
This comes a month after West and Gap Inc. severed ties, killing his Yeezy Gap clothing line after only two years of a 10-year contract that estimated $1 billion in annual sales.
"Balenciaga has no longer any relationship nor any plans for future projects related to this artist," said Balenciaga's parent company Kering to WWD.
From WWD:
The rapper, who was diagnosed in 2016 with bipolar disorder, has appeared to spiral out of control since staging a surprise YZY show in Paris that featured T-shirts with the slogan "White Lives Matter" and opened with a monologue in which he prided himself as being "unmanageable."
According to the Anti-Defamation League, "White Lives Matter" is a white supremacist phrase that originated in early 2015 as a racist response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
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 said he had agreed to buy right-wing social media platform Parler.
