What a week Kanye West has had. While his advisers are calling it the most calamitous of his career to date, Kanye doesn’t see it that way.
He believes that the global scandal caused by his wife walking the red carpet at the Grammy awards, naked aside from a whisper of mesh, has made it his greatest week so far.
As he jubilantly crowed on Instagram: ‘For clarity, February 4th 2025 my wife is the most Googled person on the planet called earth,’ before declaring proudly: ‘We beat the Grammies [sic].’
Kanye, 47, then went on to post a selection of Google Trends data, showing the number of people Googling ‘Bianca Censori outfit’ beat those looking to find out who’d won the music industry awards.
Information and misinformation has billowed since that stunt on Sunday, as is always the way with Kanye, who prefers to be known as Ye.
Topping the list of questions from a very concerned public was: did Bianca want to do it, or is she being unhappily coerced by her husband?
Kanye insisted they’d worked together and ‘tailored that invisible dress six times’, inviting the world to believe that she was, in fact, a fully willing partner in the stunt.
A day later he wrote: ‘My wife’s first red carpet opened a whole new world. I keep staring at this photo like I was staring in admiration that night. Thinking, wow, I am so lucky to have a wife that is so smart, talented, brave and hot.’
Bianca Censori, 30, wears the designed-to-shock dress that caused a global scandal at the Grammys with husband Kanye, 47, on Sunday night
Yesterday, however, the story took a yet another sinister turn when Kanye took to X with a series of vile, anti-Semitic, misogynist rants, in which he tweeted (in capital letters): ‘I have dominion over my wife, this aint no woke as feminist s**t… people say the red carpet look was her decision… I don’t make her do nothing she doesn’t want to, but she definitely wouldn’t have been able to do it without my approval.’
He also vented on other subjects, including plus-size models, a plea to President Trump to release fellow rapper Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs – currently in jail awaiting trial on charges of racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution – and declared himself a Nazi.
‘I AM A NAZI’, he wrote, later adding: ‘I LOVE HITLER NOW WHAT B*****S.’
Yet others have another theory as to the reason behind the red carpet stunt: ‘I’m afraid that it’s very possible that he did this to impress Kim,’ an associate, who is close to the rapper, told the Mail this week.
Kim being Kim Kardashian, the reality TV star and global celebrity who was Kanye’s first wife, the mother of his four children and who made an art form out of public nudity, and Google hits, long before her successor dropped her black fur coat on to the red carpet to universal gasps.
In 2014, Kim famously posed completely naked for a Paper magazine cover, which made her Bing’s most searched person that year and Google’s second, behind actress Jennifer Lawrence.
She even quipped about being the ‘most Googled person this week’ in an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
So is this proof that Kanye still hankers after Kim? And if so, what does that say about the state of his second marriage?
In October last year, numerous reports were confidently saying that Kanye and Bianca, 30, had split up and were getting a divorce – while I was being told by sources genuinely close to him that there were ‘no issues’ between man and wife.
As far as his circle are concerned, that remains the case now, although it seems that any decisions on togetherness are his to make alone: ‘If he didn’t want to be with her, she’d be gone,’ I’m told.
The truth is that Bianca, who actually dresses ‘normally’ behind closed doors, usually in vests and leggings, is fully on board with Kanye’s current project. He thinks that going out with him fully dressed and her almost naked is ‘art’, and so does she.
Their Grammys stunt was intended to reference the cover of his Vultures 1 album, which features Kanye dressed in all-black and wearing a Friday The 13th-inspired mask, standing next to Bianca, who is naked apart from a pair of thigh boots and a tiny see-through square of material over part of her derriere.
It’s an image he’s very proud of and one which, shockingly, his then ten-year-old daughter, North, replicated in a sketch which was in turn shared by her mother, Kim Kardashian, online.
As some commentators said at the time, the idea of the little girl tracing in pencil the outlines of her stepmother’s naked rear is enough to send anyone to therapy, but North is being groomed by her father as his artistic successor – more of which later.
In 2014, Kim Kardashian famously posed completely naked for a Paper magazine cover, which made her Bing’s most searched person that year and Google’s second
Now that the media noise is dying down after Sunday night’s spectacle, it is evident that Kanye and Bianca are thoroughly pleased with themselves.
On Thursday the couple were approached as they went into a recording studio in Los Angeles. Kanye demanded the videographer ask him how it feels to ‘beat the Grammys’ while Bianca giggled approvingly.
The question of why he might imagine that he is creating art by posing with his naked wife in public is trickier, however. In an interview on YouTube released this week he described himself, repeatedly as a ‘psycho genius’.
It may be significant that, as he said during that interview, he is off the medication which he was prescribed nine years ago for bipolar disorder. ‘I haven’t taken the medication since I found out that bipolar wasn’t the right diagnosis,’ he told an interviewer.
According to Kanye, he was acting on the advice of Bianca – who studied architecture at the University of Melbourne, and has no medical training – who’d told him she thinks he is autistic rather than bipolar.
He stopped taking the meds as he feared they might mess up his ‘creativity’, he said. How has this impacted on others around him, namely those who work with him day to day?
One associate said: ‘Generally, Kanye is fine to deal with. He is no ruder or more difficult than any other music star… but sometimes he will go off on a course and there is no talking to him at all.’
That said, his team of advisers, managers and lawyers do not stand up to him, or deliver bad news, apparently.
Indeed, it seems that his eccentricities – or are they worrying spells of self-sabotage – have been spiralling since the split from Kim. They’d married with huge fanfare and expense (an estimated £2million) in 2014, and had four children together: North, 11, Saint, nine, Chicago, seven, and Psalm, five.
Yet, by 2016, Kanye’s increasingly eccentric behaviour had started to place strain on the marriage. Later that year he spent time in a psychiatric hospital and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
After Donald Trump was elected for his first term in office, West insisted on visiting him in the Oval Office in 2018 and, wearing a red MAGA cap, talked about alternative universes and hydrogen-powered planes, and said that he and Trump were both ‘dragon energy’.
In June 2020, he announced he was standing for the U.S. presidency himself, running as an independent for the so-called Birthday Party. He won just 60,000 votes.
A young Bianca (second from left) pictured in Australia. Bianca attended Melbourne’s Carey Baptist Grammar School and has a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Melbourne
Then, living on a huge farm in Wyoming while wife Kim and their children remained in Los Angeles, Kanye went through a ‘spiritual awakening’.
He wrote a Christian opera, and started staging ‘Sunday Services’, over which he presided in monk-like robes and his own label Yeezy trainers, accompanied by a 120-strong choir. He told a political rally, through tears, that he and Kim had discussed aborting their daughter. This was, apparently, the final straw which led her to file for divorce in February 2021.
And after this point his behaviour became further and further outside the bounds of acceptability.
He started to wear ‘White Lives Matter’ T-shirts and wrote on Twitter that he was ‘going death con 3 on Jewish people’ – an apparent misreading of the U.S. nuclear alert status ‘Defcon’.
Lucrative partnership deals were pulled. His law firm and his agent dropped him.
Yet Kanye appeared genuinely devastated by his split from Kim, and said at the time that he wished that they could reconcile.
There was a brief liaison with actress Julia Fox, before he married Bianca, an Australian model who was working for Yeezy. They tied the knot in December 2022 shortly after his divorce from Kim was finalised.
Bianca came with quite a back story herself. She attended Melbourne’s Carey Baptist Grammar School and has a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Melbourne.
Her father, Elia ‘Leo’ Censori, once ran a gambling cartel and served time for importing heroin in the 1980s. Her uncle Eris, Leo’s brother, was a notorious gangland killer once dubbed Melbourne’s ‘Al Capone’.
When approached about her daughter’s naked stunt this week, her mother Alexandra said: ‘We are just normal people, living our own lives as privately as we can,’ she said. ‘I have nothing to say about Bianca, thank you.’
Bianca and Kanye spent much of the past year living in a hotel in Tokyo, reputedly The Edition, where he has a whole floor for his entourage, family and a recording studio, where he has been working on his forthcoming album, Bully.
There is speculation that the decision to live as an ‘upmarket hobo’ has cost him more than £3 million in hotel fees alone, although not in fine dining: he’s been spotted at a fried chicken shop in Tokyo, and also at a branch of McDonald’s.
Now he seems to be back on Los Angeles soil at the $35 million home he bought in October last year and also back in the studio.
How long the mercurial artist will remain there is an open question. He seems drawn to Japan and may return.
In his interview this week he said: ‘I love the temples. I love how people are with you, it’s just really respectful. And my wife said that in a past life I was a king, I was an emperor out here.’
Kanye has long talked about his belief in reincarnation and has flirted with the idea of being a reincarnation of Jesus or Picasso. And now he’s a Japanese emperor – with his wife’s backing.
Some hoped that his relationship with Bianca might be a steadying influence, but as time goes on it seems that – if anything – she backs his every move, however outlandish.
As the Mail revealed this week, Kanye lost a $20 million deal to play in Japan as a result of his controversial stunt with her at the Grammys. He had signed up to do two shows at the Tokyo Dome in May, but following his wife’s naked display on the red carpet of the Grammys on Sunday night, his investors took fright.
A source told me: ‘Kanye is just f***ing up every opportunity that comes to him. The stunt was creepy beyond belief and has been greeted with horror in Japan.’
Meanwhile he is pouring energy into the burgeoning career of his eldest daughter North.
She rapped in rudimentary Japanese on Kanye’s song Bomb last year, and became one of the youngest artists ever to appear on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart as a result.
She and sister Chicago also feature in the video. Last year she sang in a Hollywood Bowl concert celebrating The Lion King.
In January, she was featured on FKA Twigs’ album EUSEXUA, and that single, Childlike Things, has now landed at No 6 on the Billboard charts, meaning that she has her first Top Ten hit. Kanye is celebrating her on social media – as any proud parent would.
Mother Kim says she is feeling ‘really conflicted’ about becoming a ‘momager’ to North. Of course her own mother Kris performed this role for Kim and her sisters, helping her to turn her notoriety thanks to a leaked sex tape into a global media empire.
Kardashian, 44, said: ‘I thought I was busy before. North, me having to be her momager right now, is crazy. It was not on my list. It was not on my bingo card for this year.’
She added: ‘I’m really conflicted on my daughter’s career, so we’re going to talk about that soon. I just really want to make sure that everything’s really well balanced. All of the work experiences are balanced out with just enough fun life experiences. I just want balance.’
But being launched under the aegis of her volatile father, who wouldn’t fear what might happen next?
