Is peace between Adidas and Kanye West close? Almost a year after the end of cooperation, Executive Director The representative of the clothing brand, Bjørn Gulden, seems ready to forgive the American artist. “He made some statements that were incorrect. And this led to Adidas terminating the contract and recalling its products. It’s a shame because I don’t think he really meant what he said and I don’t think he’s a bad person,” Gulden said in an interview with a Norwegian podcast. In good company. The final split between Adidas and Kanye West, now known simply as Ye, occurred in the fall of 2022.
Allegations of anti-Semitism
The company was prompted to terminate the creative partnership by some anti-Semitic phrases uttered by the rapper. “The Jewish community, especially in the music industry, takes us and milks us to death. The media is controlled by Jews,” Ye said in an interview last year. In the following months, the contentious positions continued. In Paris, during a fashion show, E showed in public a T-shirt with the words “White lives matter“, in open controversy with the much more famous Black Lives Matter movement. Then, in December, he was suspended from Twitter for posting an image of a swastika mixed with a Star of David. “I like a lot about Hitler, even the Nazis did good things,” Yeh elaborated in an interview with Alex Jones, a radio host and figurehead of the American right-wing conspiracy.
End of partnership
In 2021 alone, Yeezy – the clothing brand founded by Kanye West – generated more than £1.2 billion for Adidas, equivalent to around 7% of its total annual revenue. After breaking ties with the rapper, the Three Stripes brand found itself with unsold products worth a total of about a billion dollars. And he decided to sell them, donating a “significant portion” of the profits to associations working against hate speech. In the first quarter of 2023, Adidas lost £350 million year-on-year due to the Yeezy line shutdown. Following the controversy over his remarks about Hitler, Kanye West has been more sober and has stayed – as far as possible – out of the controversy. And words spoken in recent days by Björn Gulden, manager of Adidas, seem to suggest that perhaps the collaboration could even resume in the future.
Photo credit: EPA/Etienne Laurent | Kanye West performing at Kid Cudi’s concert at Coachella, California in 2019.
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