Why Does the Fashion Industry Give Creatives Like Kanye West a Pass?

Soaring profits have long excused wildly inappropriate behavior.

Happening in the Back Row chat: Subscribers are sounding off on Phoebe Philo’s first namesake collection. Philo hasn’t been making clothes since she left Celine in 2017. This is a big debut for fashion, and the launch has been inescapable. Does it live up to the hype? Head to the chat to chime in and see what others are saying.

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Earlier in Back Row:

Confessions: Fashion Magazine Assistants

The great lie Us Weekly has long told us is that stars are “just like us.” If you read the New York Times investigation into Kanye West’s long fraught relationship with Adidas by Megan Twohey, you know that this is most certainly not true. Unlike us regular folk, stars are allowed to behave abominably behind closed doors with no adverse consequences — so long as they’re making certain corporations lots of money.

In 2013, when West was in a meeting to discuss his first shoe design for Adidas, he drew a swastika on the toe of a sneaker he disliked, Twohey reports. You would be justified in wondering how West even got to this point. Prior to it, he had hosted executives at his apartment for a meeting — and had them watch porn.

If most other employees had done either of these things, just two examples of West’s offenses among many included in Twohey’s story, they probably would have been fired instantly and without hesitation. But West was allowed to continue for nearly ten years, Adidas cutting ties only after his antisemitism became a public-facing problem.

The saga is just another example of a fashion company putting profits before workplace conduct, highlighting the industry’s unique proclivity for tolerating egregious behavior.

This may be because fashion is a cult of personality business where creatives are tasked with doing something few people understand, which is making cutting-edge clothes. Sometimes, when a particularly odd collection gets rave reviews, even those who work in fashion end up whispering behind the scenes about how they just don’t get it. I think this helps to explain why, when someone seems to have figured fashion out, they are treated like a god and elevated to a mythical plane where unusual and bad behavior is viewed as a natural byproduct of creative mastery. The culture expects its creative geniuses to be demanding, but also eccentric and erratic. Yet in many of these instances, the bad behavior isn’t a side effect of a genius mind. It’s simply allowed to flourish because these creatives are raking in money for their bosses.