During a recent trip to her native Melbourne, Bianca Censori, the following year. “He took me to a Lakers game… and a team of stylists came to my house, and when we came home, there were shoes piled up almost to the ceiling that they had taken out of my closet. I only had two pairs left! I almost started to cry. I spent years collecting those.”
Julia Fox, who had a short but highly publicized fling with West following his split from Kardashian, was given similar treatment. “After dinner Ye had a surprise for me,” Fox wrote for Interview in 2022. “I mean, I’m still in shock. Ye had an entire hotel suite full of clothes. I was so surprised. Like, who does things like this on a second date?”
Censori, meanwhile, has previously claimed a keen eye toward style. In 2016, she reportedly told i-D that she had started her own jewelry business when she was in high school. And in a 2021 interview with Hypebeast, Censori explained her interest in architecture: “As a child I was consistently drawn to creative endeavors, mostly artistic. I always wanted to be a sculptor and to me, architecture is the union of art and pragmatics. It is the grandest artistic gesture that we can place onto the earth. I was drawn to it, purely, as a shift in artistic scale.”
But Censori has given no such personal interviews recently, leaving others to fill in the blanks. In March, Page Six quoted a source in the fashion industry who insisted that the relationship between Censori and West is not manipulative.
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Kanye West and Bianca Censori are seen on May 13, 2023 in Los Angeles, California.
Rachpoot/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
“People are confusing Bianca’s creativity,” the source was quoted as saying. “She is a phenomenal personality, a phenomenal actor, who can entertain the public. She’s a performance artist. Bianca is as much a performer as Ye is.”
Susan Scafidi, the founder and director of Fordam’s Fashion Law Institute, had a similar theory.
“Ye is a performer, and as is common today, his most enduring creation is his own persona. My impression is that Bianca is a performer playing a role as well, using her body as a canvas,” Scafidi told The Daily Beast.
“Lately [West] is the frame to her picture, but I don’t think that necessarily implies control over her,” Scafidi said. “The coordinating outfits, however tiny on her part, can just as easily be read as her public persona or as an artistic collaboration.”
She added, “Given that Ye’s ex [Kardashian] has a hugely successful shapewear line, Skims, there may also be an element of competitive showmanship involved.”
Sanders, meanwhile, doesn’t buy into the Censori-Kardashian comparison.
“Kim never bore herself like that,” she told The Daily Beast. Compared to Kardashian, an uber-chic billionaire, Censori isn’t as “glamorous,” Sanders said. “She’s not bejeweled. She’s not carrying a designer bag.”
Sometimes, Censori even goes barefoot; in April, she strolled totally shoeless through Disneyland with West.
“The fact that people even consider this fashion or fashionable…it’s the anti, it’s the anti of fashion,” Sanders said. “It’s saying ‘F you’ to the world.”
