The website of Kanye West’s Yeezy fashion brand was offline Tuesday after it began selling plain white T-shirts with a swastika.
The site displayed the message “Something went wrong” and “This store is unavailable.”
West, who now calls himself Ye, appeared in a commercial for the site that aired in Southern California during the Super Bowl.
In the low-budget ad, the rapper was sitting in what appeared to be a dentist’s chair, flashing a set of diamond-encrusted dentures, and saying he had spent all the money for the commercial on the new teeth.
He told viewers he had filmed the ad on an iPhone and directed them to visit his yeezy.com website.
Immediately after the ad aired, Variety reported, the website had a range of West’s fashionware available, but it changed a short time later and began displaying only a single item — a white T-shirt with a large black swastika on the front, with a $20 price tag.
Variety, citing people familiar with the ad booking process, said the 30-second spot had gone through the usual approval channels, which included a look at the website. Nothing objectionable was flagged.
But by Tuesday the site, which was underpinned by e-commerce firm Shopify, was offline.
“All merchants are responsible for following the rules of our platform. This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms, so we removed them from Shopify,” Shopify said in a statement.
The fresh controversy came just days after West’s account on X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — went dark in the wake of a days-long rant that included vitriolic, anti-Semitic outbursts.
It was not immediately clear if the artist and entrepreneur, who has spoken openly about struggles with bipolar disorder, had deactivated the account himself or if X took it down.
“I’m logging out of Twitter. I appreciate Elon for allowing me to vent. It has been very cathartic to use the world as a sounding board,” he wrote in his final post, referring to the owner of X, Elon Musk.
It is a familiar pattern for Ye, 47, who is now in the headlines as often for his provocative, often hate-filled rants as he is for his music.
The rapper has been locked out of social media platforms in the past, notably when he was banned from X for nearly eight months for violating rules barring incitement to violence.
Ye’s most recent missives included comments in support of music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is imprisoned on sex trafficking charges. He repeatedly referred to himself as a “Nazi.”
He also referred to the stunt he pulled at the Grammys last week with wife Bianca Censori, who appeared virtually nude on the red carpet ahead of the awards gala.
On Tuesday, a Jewish former employee of West’s filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles alleging he had told her he was a “Nazi” and compared himself to Adolf Hitler, the Los Angeles Times reported.
(AFP)
