〽️

South of Midnight

The exposure of Bianca Censori’s body is contrasted with the enigma of her mind

No one knows what she thinks of her own public nudity or of her relationship with Kanye West – or of anything at all, for that matter, since she never talks

Apparently, they got kicked out pretty quickly. On Sunday night, the rapper Kanye West and his wife, the Australian former model and “Yeezy” brand architectural designer Bianca Censori, appeared at the Grammy awards. West wore black sunglasses; Censori wore basically nothing. In a stunt for the cameras, West posed behind Censori as she turned her back to the paparazzi and lowered a long fur coat down her shoulders. When she turned to face the photographers, she was wearing a fully transparent mini dress, and no underwear. The effect was that she appeared completely nude. According to Page Six, the pair were “escorted out” following the incident, though others claim that the couple left of their own accord. West, after all, was only nominally a contender for a Grammy this year: he was nominated in just one category, best rap song, for Carnival, his collaboration with Ty Dolla $ign. He ultimately lost, but he didn’t come to the Grammy awards expecting to win. What he wanted out of his attendance was what he got when Censori dropped her coat.

The clothing, or rather lack thereof, is typical of Censori in her appearances with West. Since the pair married in early 2023 – shortly after West finalized his divorce from reality star Kim Kardashian – Censori has rarely been seen without West, and rarely wearing clothes. On a 2024 trip to a restaurant in Los Angeles, she wore a sheer flesh-colored bodysuit with long sleeves but no coverage over her breasts; that same summer, at the Chateau Marmont, she wore thong underwear without any pants; on a trip to the movies, she wore a sheer crop top with no bra, and a pair of shorts so short, they tipped into the genre of briefs. The effect of her nudity and near-nudity is heightened by the proximity of Kanye West, her husband, who is usually wearing too much clothing beside Censori’s too little: long pants, long sleeves, high necks, and layers of jackers, sweatshirts, and ponchos, often combined with a beard and dark sunglasses that conceal his face.

Risque fashion is a tradition of its own, and the bodies of celebrity women are offered up for exposure and visual consumption in a kind of conventional ritual that often carried its own critique. In terms of sheer exposure, Censori’s “outfit”, as it were, at the 2025 Grammys is not so different from Rihanna’s famous sparkly-sheer flapper-inspired number from the 2014 Council of Fashion Designers of America awards. And yet Censori’s habit of nudity is darker, less playful, and not just because it declines to partake of the coquettish ritual of faux-concealment that is typical of so much other revealing fashion – and, indeed, of celebrity itself.

There is a clear desire to shock in her appearances with West, but there is no playfulness. In vain one scans the photos of Censori in search of a smile, a twinkle in her eye, a sign of conspiratorial pleasure, or of being in on the joke, or even of mere willingness. One sees only the blankness of her expression, vacant and somewhat sad. Writing in the New Yorker, Naomi Fry called her a “pure, mute spectacle of flesh”.

The exposure of Censori’s body is contrasted with the enigma of her mind. Officially speaking, no one knows what she thinks of her own public nudity, or of her relationship with West – or of anything at all, for that matter, since she never talks. West, however, is somewhat less of a mystery. Around the time of his messy divorce from Kardashian, with whom he shares four children, West’s behavior became erratic. He launched a half-hearted run for president before endorsing Donald Trump; he praised Hitler and tweeted that he would “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”.

This public behavior was allegedly paired with increasingly disturbing private actions, especially concerning sex and women. Back before he lost his partnership with Adidas, he showed executives there pornographic videos on his phone during a meeting. He is being sued by at least two women for sexual assault. One, a model for a music video that West worked on, says that he strangled her and shoved his fingers in her mouth during a music video shoot at New York City’s Chelsea hotel in 2010, allegedly yelling “This is art, this is fucking art,” during the attack. Another, his former assistant, accuses West of sexually assaulting her on multiple occasions, including one incident in which she claims that West drugged her in the presence of the rapper and accused sex trafficker Sean “Diddy” Combs. West has called the allegations “baseless”.

As for Censori, her mother came to California from Australia not long after the marriage, reportedly because she was concerned about her daughter. On one of the visits, according to West’s former assistant, West told Censori that he wanted to have sex with Censori’s mother and to make Censori watch.

It would be generous – and easier on our consciences – to imagine Censori and West partaking, together, in a critique of gender and celebrity. In this version of events, what West is doing when he stands behind Censori and watches her undress for paparazzi photographers is not using her degradation and vulnerability as proof of his status, but indicting us, the viewer.

His vampiric consumption of her body becomes ours: the brutal depiction of heterosexuality as a practice of domination and value extraction is shown to be the same as the practice of celebrity and its consumption. But if that critique is contained in West and Censori’s spectacle, it may be we, not them, who puts it there. Censori’s consent and knowingness is not, actually, in evidence here; and even if it was, consent exists, often, even in situations of asymmetry and violence, even in situations where great harm is being done. Critiquing Censori as an artist allows us to see her differently, as something more hopeful and complicated than a victim of brutality. But sometimes things are what they look like.