Oct. 22 (UPI) — The luxury fashion house Balenciaga has ended its partnership with Kanye West after recent anti-Semitic remarks by the rapper, a report said Thursday.
“Balenciaga has no longer any relationship nor any plans for future projects related to this artist,” Balenciaga’s parent company Kering said in a statement to Women’s Wear Daily on Thursday.
The company, which also has close ties with his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, has not made any public comments about its ties to West, who has officially changed his name to Ye. The rapper has also not addressed the reported fallout with Balenciaga.
West, 45, is worth around $2 billion for his music and sneaker brand Yeezy as well as his former partnership with Gap, which ended recently. His partnership with Adidas for his Yeezy brand is “under review” by the company.
Earlier this month, he was locked out of his Instagram and Twitter accounts after anti-Semitic remarks he made in the wake of wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt to his Yeezy collection show during Paris Fashion Week. In Paris, West had also walked as a model in Balenciaga’s show.
West’s account on Instagram was restricted after the rapper posted a screenshot of text messages with Sean Combs, also known as P. Diddy, stemming from the Paris Fashion Week incident and a feud with Tremaine Emory over comments about the late Virgil Abloh.
In the since-deleted messages with Combs, Diddy asked West to “stop playing these internet games” to which West responded that he would use Combs as “an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.”
West, in a now-deleted tweet, also said after the restriction he “can’t be anti-Semitic” because “Black people are actually Jew also.”
“You guys have toyed with me and tried to blackball anyone whoever opposes your agenda,” West said.
West, who had most recently tweeted in November 2020, returned to the platform after he was restricted on Instagram but was locked out of Twitter later that day.
The rapper made controversial statements again last weekend in an appearance on the Drink Champs podcast in which he said George Floyd, the Black man who was murdered by a group of Minneapolis police officers in 2020, had died from fentanyl.
“They hit him with the fentanyl, if you look the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that,” West said on the podcast.
After facing the lockouts on Twitter and Instagram, Parlement Technologies, the company behind Parler, announced Monday that the controversial social media site would be sold to him.
