New York
CNN Business
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Fashion powerhouse Balenciaga has officially severed ties with Kanye West following a series of anti-Semitic posts and other controversial comments by the rapper, according to a report by Women’s Wear Daily citing a statement from Balenciaga’s parent company.
“Balenciaga no longer has any relationship or future plans related to this artist,” Kering, Balenciaga’s parent company, said in a statement to WWD. Kering did not respond to requests for comment from CNN Business.
West, who legally changed his name to Ye, collaborated with Balenciaga for a very popular Yeezy Gap line earlier this year. Gap first announced its 10-year deal with Ye for the Yeezy Gap brand in June 2020, but West said last month that he was end its partnership with the Gap due to “substantial non-compliance”.
In an internal company email, Mark Breitbard, president and CEO of Gap Brand, said he had decided to “end the partnership” because their “vision is not aligned.”
Adidas also said it was review your partnership with West after an increasingly strained relationship developed between the two.
The New York Times reported that the relationship between West and Balenciaga has been close and that he and creative director Demna Gvasalia text “several times a day”. But Gvalia and Cédric Charbit, the chief executive of Balenciaga, reportedly attended the ill-fated Paris fashion show where West wore one of his controversial lines of “White Lives Matter” shirts.
Ye’s Twitter and Instagram accounts were limit earlier this month for violating policies on posts containing anti-Semitic content.
In a now-deleted tweet, West said he was “gonna die fuck 3 [sic] On JEWS,” according to Internet Archive Wayback Machine records retrieved by CNN.
Recently, Ye announced his intention to acquire speaka far-right social platform, to avoid having “to fear being removed from social networks again”.
