Is Kanye West’s architecture graduate wife a muse to a genius (as she claims) or a brainwashed puppet in a sad freak show?
THE French pride themselves on being fashionably unshockable but judging by the expressions on some faces on Tuesday when Bianca Censori pitched up at Paris Fashion Week, it was clear that they’d finally met their match.
Mrs Kanye West emerged, silently and dead-eyed, from a giant SUV into the Ritz Hotel wearing a fur bolero jacket, black stilettos and a pair of ultra-sheer tights — but no underwear.
In a reversal of her usual policy of wearing next to nothing on her top half, the young Australian revealed her lower body in such unsparing detail that published pictures had to be blurred out on decency grounds.
In fact, although she looked as though she was completely naked, she wasn’t quite. Under her tights she was wearing a ‘modesty’ patch, an adhesive strapless thong covering only the genitals — the type used by actors filming sex scenes.
Censori, an architecture graduate who drifted into the baleful orbit of the controversial superstar rapper and has reputedly never been the same again, may have worn the patch to avoid breaking the law.
She could have been liable to a possible prison sentence or €15,000 fine under a French ban on ‘deliberate sexual display’ in public.
Days later, the two incurable romantics were out again to dine at a smart restaurant in the City of Love.
Predictably, they were as determined as ever to keep causing a stir, Censori, 29, again dispensing with underwear. This time she wore a sheer black tank top and a similarly sheer pair of stockings, and held her phone over her groin.
She appeared to be wearing the same modesty patch — although it’s an ill-named accessory in their case. For there’s nothing remotely modest about the behaviour of 46-year-old Kanye West and his strangely inanimate wife whose every public outing becomes a grotesque freak show.
And it’s a freak show, observers haven’t failed to notice, in which she is the sole exhibit. While West dresses head-to-toe in black — sometimes adding a full-face mask — he leaves his wife to trail in his wake wearing outfits that have become progressively more revealing. And for those who wonder what on earth she is doing, progressively more worrying.
The notoriously domineering and unstable West — described by a former business associate as ‘a master of spectacle’ and so narcissistic he appears to have a god complex — has been described as controlling by his former wife, the reality TV star Kim Kardashian (whom Censori closely resembles).
SHE has spoken emotionally about how he threw out most of her clothes and insisted she wore outfits he chose. West’s treatment of his new wife appears even more extreme. It’s been reported that he issued Censori with a set of rules to live by — including what to wear and specific foods she can eat.
No wonder her family and friends — who apparently have never approved of West — are said to be concerned about what they see as her unhealthily submissive relationship with an overbearing celebrity worth $400 million, who plucked her from obscurity among the staff of his fashion company Yeezy. If their peculiar double act is meant to be performance art, the couple have been told, the show is definitely over.
Her Italian-born father Leo Censori is reported to be among those who are upset. ‘He wants to have a proper sit down with Kanye and ask him what the hell he is thinking when he parades Bianca around like a trashy naked trophy pony,’ an insider told MailOnline this week.
‘He wants to ask Kanye what he would do if his daughters, North or Chicago, were seen in public half-naked in outfits encouraged by their husbands.’
Censori’s background is hardly conventional. Her father is a convicted criminal who has served time in prison for heroin offences as well as possessing a firearm. His brother Eris Censori was a notorious gangland killer, dubbed ‘ Melbourne’s Al Capone’, who was given a life sentence for murder.
After graduating from university in her native Melbourne and briefly running a jewellery-design business, Censori got a job as an ‘architectural designer’ at Yeezy in the U.S. in November 2020.
Barely two years later, in December 2022, she supposedly married West in a ‘private ceremony to celebrate their love’ in Beverly Hills — just a month after he finalised his high-profile divorce from Kim Kardashian after seven years of marriage and four children.
The union’s legality has been questioned since West and Censori never filed a marriage certificate. But it’s now claimed they obtained a ‘confidential’ licence to keep it under wraps. Although their marital home was listed as his ranch in Wyoming, they moved into a $20,000-a-month apartment in West Hollywood.
It was in Venice last summer that the pair provoked a police investigation for breaching ‘standards of public decorum’ after they appeared to indulge in a very public sexual act on board a water taxi crossing the lagoon. West was pictured with his trousers down while Censori was crouching between his legs.
A few weeks later, some of her friends reportedly managed to contact her — apparently not an easy feat these days — to express their deep misgivings over her relationship with West.
She was not only unreceptive but accused them of being ‘jealous of her stardom’, it is claimed. ‘Bianca knows how to grab headlines now… it gives her what she has always wanted — fame,’ said a source.
AND yet the same source also said that Censori had been ‘brainwashed’ by the star. Another insider has said Censori, normally an outspoken and lively personality, is ‘stuck’. Of course, she could be both complicit in the charade and under West’s control.
A former colleague who knows Censori from her time at Yeezy told the Mail this week that Bianca genuinely believes she is West’s ‘muse’ and is happy to put up with his controlling ways and difficult temperament as she regards him as a genius.
After she returned to Australia on a solo trip late last year, some of her old girlfriends — who have described Censori as a ‘social butterfly’ — said they thought they might have convinced her to distance herself from West. Their optimism was clearly misplaced.
Even so, incurring the displeasure of Censori’s friends and robust family is unlikely to matter one jot to a celebrity who surrounds himself with bodyguards and whose various homes are on the other side of the world to Melbourne.
Describing his bipolar disorder (a condition that some insist explains his bafflingly obnoxious conduct) as his ‘superpower’, West has compared himself to Picasso, Shakespeare and even Jesus.
Suspicions that he regards Bianca Censori as his artistic creation were strengthened on January 2 when he posted a picture of his nearly-naked wife to his 20 million Instagram followers and — as matter of factly as if he were announcing forthcoming tour dates — proclaimed there would be ‘no pants this year’.
If that was an instruction rather than a prediction, she has more than complied. Underwear, not to mention trousers, are definitely ‘out’ for 2024 as Bianca has experimented with a transparent raincoat and other outfits which have revealed her nakedness underneath. And her husband
wants the world to know it. Having stripped down his name to ‘Ye’, he revels in his wife stripping down literally and then posting provocative photos of her on social media to his slathering male fans. In January, for instance, he provided one of the back view of Censori preparing food in a kitchen, wearing virtually nothing but knee-high black boots and a shiny black latex mask.
As for her social media activity, it’s been reported that West ‘banned’ Censori from having her own accounts to protect her from negative comments (although sources close to her see it as a way of further ‘ isolating’ her from reality).
Last month, the ludicrous pair stepped out at a Milan fashion show, Censori wearing an outlandish black leather outfit that looked like a bin liner — possibly designed by West — and revealed yet again she had nothing underneath.
(On this occasion she managed a smile, reassuring some online observers that perhaps she may not be entirely in thrall to him).
As social media critics accuse him of exploiting Censori and raise fears for her wellbeing, West is completely unrepentant.
In an expletive-filled online diatribe he said he posted so many shocking pictures of her ‘cause she makes me happy’, adding: ‘If you don’t like my page and don’t like what I’m posting, go f*** yourself. Seriously, leave me — leave the king — the f*** alone.’
Certainly, the way the ‘ king’ behaves with Censori tallies with how he behaves in general nowadays: ridiculously selfimportant and tiresomely fixated on courting controversy.
Although some who know West say he can be extraordinarily generous to total strangers, it is his darker side that has increasingly come to the fore.
West, whose monstrous ego convinced him to announce a disastrous run for the U.S. Presidency in 2020, has praised Hitler, described slavery as a ‘choice’ and vowed (long before the present conflict in Gaza) to go to war with the Jewish people.
Both sportswear giant Adidas and fashion house Balenciaga severed ties with him in 2022 over his anti-Semitic remarks, cutting his billionaire status to that of a mere multi-millionaire.
Last October, it emerged that Adidas had for years tolerated his obnoxious and thuggish behaviour because Yeezys, the shoes he designed for the company, were bringing in $1billion a year.
Insiders said West demanded Adidas executives watch pornography to ‘spark creativity’, advised a Jewish manager at the company to kiss a picture of Hitler every day, hurled shoes around meetings and frequently played the race card by claiming he was the German company’s ‘slave’. He even hired porn actresses to appear in Yeezy promotional photos.
HISattitude to women has always been questionable. In 2016, years after storming on stage at an awards ceremony to say Taylor Swift didn’t deserve to win, he released a song with the lyrics: ‘ I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex / Why? I made that b**** famous.’
Just over a month ago, the notoriously moody West let fly when a female reporter in LA asked him about his treatment of Censori. ‘Some people say you’re controlling her,’ she ventured.
The rapper grabbed her phone and berated her for three minutes for daring to question a ‘grown-ass superhero’ and ‘legend’ like him.
‘You think ’cause you a white woman that you can walk up on me like that and ask me some dumb ass s*** like that? Ask me about my wife?’
He added: ‘Do you have free will or you work for the devil?’
All this garbled talk of superheroes, legends and devils will encourage those who argue that West isn’t just addicted to attention but is mentally ill.
Some believe West’s deteriorating mental state is rooted in the sudden death of his beloved mother, Donda Williams, aged 58, back in 2007.
An English literature academic, she raised him largely on her own in Chicago and later became a rock of advice and support as he rose to fame. Although she’d hoped he would follow her into academia, she is credited with imbuing him with a steely self-confidence and sense of black pride.
She died from a heart attack during cosmetic surgery and West has blamed himself, saying she would never have had the surgery if she hadn’t come out to live with him under the spotlight in LA.
However, one has to wonder how much longer his defenders can make excuses for him.
Last December, West released a song titled Censori Overload. It’s a sentiment that one doesn’t need to be a Kanye fan to share.