Rapper Kanye West’s Yeezy website goes down after Nazi T-shirt sales
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Kanye West, who now calls himself Ye, appeared in a commercial for the site that aired in Southern California during the Super Bowl on Feb 9.
PHOTO: AFP
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LOS ANGELES – The website of Kanye West’s Yeezy fashion brand was offline on Feb 11 after it began selling plain white T-shirts with a swastika.
The site displayed the messages “Something went wrong” and “This store is unavailable”.
The American rapper-designer, who now calls himself Ye, appeared in a commercial for the site that aired in Southern California during the Super Bowl on Feb 9.
In the low-budget ad, Ye, 47, 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, American entertainment publication Variety reported, the website had a range of Ye’s fashion products available, but it soon changed and began displaying only a single item – a white T-shirt with a large black swastika on the front, with a US$20 (S$27) 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 Feb 11, 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 Ye’s account on X went dark in the wake of a days-long rant that included vitriolic anti-Semitic outbursts.
It was not immediately clear if the artiste and entrepreneur, who has spoken openly about struggles with bipolar disorder, had deactivated the account himself or if X took it down.
On Feb 11, a Jewish former employee of Ye’s filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles, alleging he had told her he was a “Nazi” and compared himself with Adolf Hitler, the Los Angeles Times reported. AFP
