Summer 2024 In Europe: Kanye West And Bianca Censori Return To Italy

For Kanye West and Bianca Censori, the runners of the somewhat afflicted-but-still-extant Yeezy brand, summer 2023 was about kicking back in idyllic northern Italy, primarily in the Renaissance capital Florence. Northern Italy is where the great Italian fashion and legendary fabric houses are — which is why, pictured above in February, West and Censori returned to attend a Milan fashion week show. This May 28, the news hit Florence that last season’s arguably best-known summer visitors had returned and were busy taking up residence in the Tuscan capital, as they did in August 2023.

There is currently no hint as to how long they will stay this time. It is safe to say that West does nothing by half-measures, and that in 2023 the couple stayed for some three months, well past the end of the Med party season, through the end of October. The point is that they stayed long enough so that people began to wonder what was up. Predictably, that ignited a firestorm of (published) rumor that West was recording in Milan, and secondarily, that West might stage a concert in Reggio Emilia at the end of October, the date for which was pushed a couple of times. There was a bare minimum of facilitating paperwork filed with the authorities in Reggio Emilia, and then, nearly as mysteriously, West and Censori evaporated back to the States. No concert happened.

It’s a fact that the infamous October 2022 collapse of the former shoe mogul’s fashion business, specifically, the instant collapse of his deal with Adidas and other collaborations as a direct result of his public anti-semitic outbursts, reduced his financial viability by orders of magnitude. In the year-plus since then, that self-inflicted tectonic shift seems to have only deepened the already-obscure way Kanye West does business. If anything, it has exacerbated his day-to-day unpredictability.

Despite that chaos, the couple’s long 2023 summer/fall sojourn meant that there were some familiar features to the 28 May touchdown in Florence. On cue, exactly as Ms. Censori accessorized herself on one notable stroll in Florence with her husband last August, she made a second splashy pedestrian appearance in the birthplace of the Renaissance, gadding about while clutching a rather large pillow across the front of her body. The 2023 walkabout pillow was purple. The Memorial Day 2024 walkabout pillow was blaze-white.

To her credit, Ms. Censori’s Memorial Day 2024 base outfit, a long-sleeved white bodysuit with a thong cut, paired with thigh-high boots, still nominally covered a greater percentage of her than the more-or-less topless “half-suit” had managed to do in 2023. Said another way, last summer, Ms. Censori clutched her purple pillow across herself as she might hug a life vest that she had successfully grabbed as she disembarked a recent shipwreck on the Tuscan coast. She seemed aware that she was naked, or nearly so. While it can be that she’s simply gotten used to the edginess of this attire, rumored to have been designed and/or mandated by none other than her husband, her May 28 introductory stroll about Florence was markedly more assured and less hunted than in 2023.

From the Italian perspective, much has transpired since the West-Censori family unit first established northern Italy, and specifically Tuscany, as a favored hub in Europe. In the early going, the Italians were welcoming, if a bit taken aback by Bianca Censori’s attire in town. Italy is liberal in expression and in deed but socially it remains a conservative Catholic country and is home to the Holy See, so there are codified rules for public behavior and dress. No one knew quite what to make of the quirky hoodies and monochrome Ninja-wear that Kanye West got up to, pictured above exiting a building solo in Milan. More often than not, he simply wore some special socks, or went barefoot, while her graphic catsuits and leotards were more than a little too blunt for the Italians.

In all, over time, the couple’s look successfully broadcast an enormous disregard for the place, and that feature of their Florence ‘24 touchdown seems set to continue. Last year, as the rumors of a possible concert were at their peak in October, it was thought a hopeful sign for the man’s core business that a musical event was at least being discussed. There were serious estimates being discussed by the relevant Italian authorities that, were a Kanye West concert to happen, some 80,000 to 100,000 could be expected.

Inflated or not, febrile or real, the numbers imparted some few molecules of professional viability to the man. The question Kanye West has to grapple with is whether he can, still, be the performer who can live up to that.