For Kanye West and Bianca Censori, the runners of the somewhat afflicted-but-still-extant Yeezy brand, summer 2023 was about kicking back in idyllic northern Italy, primarily in the Renaissance capital Florence. Northern Italy is where the great Italian fashion and legendary fabric houses are — which is why, pictured above in February, West and Censori returned to attend a Milan fashion week show.
Notably, at least some, if not the majority, of the clothing manufactured for the Yeezy line is made in Prato, the textile-manufacturing city just northwest of Florence, which goes at least part of the way toward explaining their West and Censori’s relatively constant attachment to Tuscany. Said another way, it’s one sort of a relief that it’s not just the Uffizi or the Renaissance or the gadding about in the streets for the paparazzi that has been drawing them back, and it’s another sort of relief that West remains reality-based enough to return discuss business with a manufacturing partner in the region, whether or not that is the overriding purpose of this particular trip.
This May 28, the news hit Florence that last season’s arguably best-known summer visitors had returned and were busy taking up residence in the Tuscan capital, as they did in August 2023. There is currently no hint as to how long they will stay this time, although it seems safe to say that there are projects brewing, or at least, rumored to be brewing. West shows no signs of abandoning the fashion business although many of its very biggest players have abandoned him, so it is highly likely that he will put together some sort of response to his current, dire lack of partners by putting out some new clothes.
It is safe to say that West does nothing by half-measures, and that in 2023 the couple stayed for some three months, well past the end of the Med party season, through the end of October. The point is that they stayed long enough so that people began to wonder what was up.
Predictably, that ignited a firestorm of (published) rumor that West was recording in Milan, and secondarily, that West might stage a concert in Reggio Emilia at the end of October, the date for which was only somewhat made real and then pushed a couple of times. There was a bare minimum of facilitating paperwork filed with the authorities in Reggio Emilia, and then, nearly as mysteriously, West and Censori evaporated back to the States. No concert happened.
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It’s a fact that the infamous, and enormous, October 2022 collapse of the former shoe mogul’s fashion business, specifically, the instant spiking of his deal with Adidas and other lucrative collaborations as a direct result of his public anti-semitic outbursts, reduced West’s financial viability by orders of magnitude. In the year-plus since then, that self-inflicted tectonic shift seems to have only deepened the already-obscure way Kanye West does business. If anything, it has exacerbated his day-to-day unpredictability.
Despite that chaos, the couple’s long 2023 summer/fall Italian sojourn meant that there were some familiar features to the 28 May touchdown in Florence. On cue, exactly as Ms. Censori accessorized herself on one notable stroll in Florence with her husband last August, she made a second splashy pedestrian appearance in the birthplace of the Renaissance, gadding about while clutching a rather large pillow across the front of her body. The 2023 walkabout pillow was purple. The Memorial Day 2024 walkabout pillow was blaze-white.
To her credit, Ms. Censori’s Memorial Day 2024 base outfit, a long-sleeved white bodysuit with a thong cut, paired with thigh-high boots, still nominally covered a greater percentage of her than the more-or-less topless “half-suit” had managed to do in 2023. Said another way, last summer, Ms. Censori clutched her purple pillow across herself as she might hug a life vest that she had successfully grabbed as she disembarked a recent shipwreck on the Tuscan coast. She seemed aware that she was naked, or nearly so. While it can be that she’s simply gotten used to the edginess of this whole not-there attire, rumored to have been designed and/or mandated by none other than her husband, her May 28 introductory stroll about Florence was markedly more assured and less hunted than in 2023.
From the Italian perspective, much has transpired since the West-Censori family unit first established northern Italy, and specifically Tuscany, as a favored hub in Europe. It’s early days, but most recently, back home in the States where ventures like this are easy, West has reportedly been in talks to jump-start a p*rnography production company. Given his designs for his wife, we might say that that seems a natural extension of his fashion work.
It might seem a non-sequitur in relation to West’s efforts in p*rnography, but among his several political curlicues, West is an admirer of Donald Trump, has occasionally been seen in Trump gear and has been photographed with Trump during his term in the White House. For the p*rnography venture, West has reportedly been speaking with Vixen Media Group honcho-man and industry veteran Mike Moz. Closing the circle, then, Moz is the ex-husband of Stormy Daniels, the retired p*rn star whose revelations of hush money kick-started the former president’s historic trial and conviction. Whether “Yeezy p*rn” gets off the ground or not is anybody’s guess, but as corporate backdrop, it rounds out the post-Adidas business tapestry for the brand with an apt cast of shadow.
Back in Europe, where the man is now: In the early going in 2023, the Italians were welcoming, if a bit taken aback by Bianca Censori’s attire in town. Italy is liberal in expression and in deed and certainly boasts its share of Europe’s reputation for licentious beach-wear, but socially the country remains a conservative Catholic bulwark and is home to the Holy See. The point is that there are codified rules for public behavior and dress. As the initial delight at the couple’s outlandish presence wore off, no one in Milan, Florence or Venice quite knew what to make of the quirky hoodies and monochrome Ninja-wear that Kanye West got up to, pictured above as he exited a building solo in Milan. More often than not, he simply wore some special socks, or went barefoot, while Censori’s graphic catsuits and leotards grew more than a little too blunt for the Italians.
In all, over time, the couple’s looks successfully broadcast disregard for the country’s conservative posture, and that feature of their Florence ‘24 touchdown seems set to continue. Last year, as the rumors of a possible concert were at their peak in October, it was thought a hopeful sign for the man’s core business that a musical event was at least being discussed. The relevant Italian municipal authorities charged with basic crowd security and other large-assembly issues put forth estimates that, were a Kanye West concert to happen, some 80,000 to 100,000 could be expected.
Inflated or not, real or febrile or just plain angst-ridden — or all of the above at once — the numbers imparted some few molecules of professional viability to the man. Now returned to Italy, where he left the question of his life as a performer of his music open, the question Kanye West still has to face is whether he can even any longer be the performer who can live up to that.
