“Kanye and Adidas: Money, Misconduct and the Price of Appeasement”, 2023-10-27 (; backlinks):
A year ago, after producing hundreds of shoe styles and billions of dollars together, Adidas broke with Kanye West [age 45] as he made antisemitic and other offensive public comments. But Adidas had been tolerating his misconduct behind the scenes for nearly a decade.
…But nothing they showed that day at the company’s German headquarters captured the vision Mr. West had shared. To convey how offensive he considered the designs, he grabbed a sketch of a shoe and took a marker to the toe, according to two participants. Then he drew a swastika…He later advised a Jewish Adidas manager to kiss a picture of Hitler every day, and he told a member of the company’s executive board that he had paid a 7-figure settlement to one of his own senior employees who accused him of repeatedly praising the architect of the Holocaust…When the company ended the relationship last October, it appeared to be the culmination of weeks of Mr. West’s inflammatory public remarks—targeting Jews and disparaging Black Lives Matter—and outside pressure on the brand to cut ties. But it was also the culmination of a decade of Adidas’s tolerance behind the scenes.
Inside their partnership, the artist made antisemitic and sexually offensive comments, displayed erratic behavior, and issued ever escalating demands, a New York Times examination found. Adidas’s leaders, eager for the profits, time and again bided his misconduct.
When he exploded in bitter outbursts at Adidas managers, the company typically sought not to rein him in but to appease him. In negotiations over the years, Adidas kept sweetening the deal, doubling down on its investment and tethering its fortunes more closely to him.
Even as Mr. West voiced increasingly toxic beliefs, privately and publicly, Adidas stepped up production and released Yeezys more frequently. And executives disregarded employee concerns that his troubling conduct risked tainting the brand’s reputation.
[Hypersexuality] …Just weeks before the 2013 swastika incident, The Times found, Mr. West made Adidas executives watch pornography during a meeting at his Manhattan apartment, ostensibly to spark creativity. In February 2015, preparing to show the first Yeezy collection at New York Fashion Week, staff members complained that he had upset them with angry, sexually crude comments…Mr. West continued to show pornography to Adidas employees, and chose porn actresses to appear in Yeezy promotional photos, according to several people who worked with him…In interviews years later, Mr. West would reveal addictions to alcohol and pornography…So he went to war: railing on social media [in September 2022] about the chief executive and the supervisory board, and persuading high-profile friends, like Diddy and Swizz Beatz, to threaten a boycott. Then, to emphasize his sense of betrayal, he ambushed executives at the Los Angeles office with a pornographic film about a woman wronged by her cheating boyfriend.
…Again and again, Mr. West contended that Adidas was exploiting him. “I feel super disrespected in this ‘partnership’”, he said in one text message. “I’ve never felt understood”, he wrote in another. He routinely sought more money and power, even suggesting that he should become Adidas’s chief executive.
[Mood swings] His complaints were often delivered amid mood swings, creating whiplash for the Adidas team working with him. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, he at times rejected the assessment and resisted treatment. Tears were common; so was fury…The month before, an internal text message described him becoming “fully, fully ramped up” and charging, “‘This is slavery’”—an accusation he leveled multiple times during the partnership…And he was quick to anger when frustrated. Running up against the deadline for the first Yeezy fashion show in February 2015 [in NYC], he lashed out, using sexually explicit language, at Rachel Muscat—the rare female manager in a male-dominated industry—and other Adidas employees…Taking the stage with Mr. Wexler, Ms. Muscat and Arthur Hoeld, a top Adidas executive [at the ‘shoe Oscars’], Mr. West acknowledged that he could be a difficult partner. “It’s cool to be up here with the 3 people that I’ve screamed at the most in the past year”, he said, beaming.
His tone shifting, he later added, “Jon basically saved my life.”
…He had already acknowledged his deep [catatonic?] depression after his mother’s [Donda West] unexpected death in 2007.
…The chief executive’s response disturbed some Adidas employees, including in the Yeezy unit. Most were fans of Mr. West. Still, working with him took a toll. The Yeezy team adopted a strategy it likened to firefighting: rotating people on and off the front lines of dealing with the artist. Adidas also assigned a human resources official to the group, gave each new hire a subscription to a meditation app and gathered the staff regularly for something akin to group therapy.
…The Yzy Hotline: In 2018, a group of Adidas executives and managers started a text message chain, called the
Yzy hotline, to address problems in the collaboration. It was an ongoing effort to help Mr. West, contain him, or somehow do both.“He doesn’t understand how his money works and he only trusts Adidas”, one manager texted colleagues after a call with the musician in early 2019. The group agreed that it would advise him on his finances, and take control of his Yeezy payroll and his mismanaged Yeezy website, which eventually had to pay a nearly $1 million fine for delayed shoe shipments to consumers.
Other messages registered a sense of alarm—not over Mr. West’s offensive public statements or behavior, which seemed not to have deterred shoe sales, but over his shifting, outsize expectations and his vehemence in their private dealings. “Kasper just spoke with him”, Mr. Liedtke wrote after a call between the chief executive and Mr. West in 2019. “Started out slowly, but built into a full-blown rant.”
…In 2019, Mr. West abruptly moved his Yeezy operation again, this time to remote Cody, Wyoming [near his “West Lake Ranch”], and demanded that the Adidas team relocate. “We are in a code red”, Mr. Anfuso wrote to the Yzy hotline in October 2019, adding 3 🚨 emojis. “The first line is completely exhausted and don’t feel supported or comfortable with how this is progressing.”…When Mr. West arrived at the office, he appeared to notice only the shoes lining the floor, awaiting his approval. He began lobbing sneakers around the room. Then he stomped out.
[Delusions of grandeur] …At the same time, he scaled his goals, opening an unaccredited Christian school, taking on a disastrous 2020 presidential campaign that reflected his rightward political drift, and promising to create flying cars, build futuristic communities and otherwise solve the world’s problems…Days later, leaked audio revealed him erupting backstage at Saturday Night Live after a set design change, yelling that he was “50% more influential than any other human being.” He also disclosed on Twitter that he was “$66.28$532016 million dollars in personal debt.” That debt had mounted as he spent with abandon, according to Pete Fox, chief executive of Mr. West’s Yeezy operation at the time.
…‘The World Changes Now’: The Yeezy debut at New York Fashion Week in 2015 was a display of star power. The front row was packed with Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Rihanna and a cluster of Kardashians. The event streamed in movie theaters around the world. It was exactly what Mr. West—and Adidas—had wanted.
…Mr. West, who had started describing himself as a born-again Christian, was channeling his musical ambitions into Sunday Service performances with a choir and infusing religious language into his other work. He used “terms like ‘believer’ and ‘pilgrimage’” to describe those who would follow him to Cody [Wyoming], Mr. Wexler messaged the Yzy hotline. “Everyone has to believe he is the greatest artist of all time.
…During an interview on the “Drink Champs” podcast, he spread conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the levers of power and insisted that the police hadn’t killed George Floyd. Then he taunted: “I can say antisemitic things and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what?”…On Oct. 25, 9 days after Mr. West declared that Adidas wouldn’t end his deal, the company did just that…Even then, Mr. West was unrepentant; in the following months, he went on to explicitly state his fondness for Hitler, deny the Holocaust and tweet an image combining the Star of David with a swastika. At the time, he also talked about a new presidential run, hiring Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist, for a brief stint and the far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who now describes himself as head of government and public affairs for Mr. West’s Yeezy operation.
[Hypomania/sleep] …Adidas employees quickly discovered that Mr. West was brimming with ideas. They also learned that he operated unlike anyone else they had encountered. He could be enthusiastic to the point of creating chaos. Early on, he showed up unexpectedly at Adidas’s New York office with Ms. Kardashian and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of sewing machines. It was so disruptive that he was sent to a studio across town. Once immersed in the design work, he so obsessed over every detail that it was hard to finish anything…They also said they had seen him drinking at work and noticed that he sometimes went days with little or no sleep…“He challenges everything but he puts full energy into how he challenges it, and you see the results”, Nic Galway, a top Adidas designer, said in a 2015 interview.
…He had been criminally investigated for assault after altercations with a photographer and a man hurling epithets at Ms. Kardashian; he had paid civil settlements to both.
…Meeting with Adidas’s leaders in November 2019 to discuss his demands, he hurled shoes around the room.
…[But] Attention quickly shifted to the show, however, where the shoes drew raves…Released in limited runs over the next few months, the shoes sold out in hours, crashing servers and sending prices soaring on resale sites. They hooked sneakerheads, fashionistas and even athletes who had endorsement deals with Adidas rivals.
…The partnership was now a marriage, as Mr. West put it. He signed the new contract in May 2016.
That fall, during his first tour in 3 years, his concerts took a turn. He stunned a crowd in Sacramento with a 17-minute tirade, praising President-elect Donald J. Trump; condemning the media, tech and music industries; bad-mouthing Beyoncé; and insinuating that Jay-Z might send “killers” after him. He cut the show short and, soon after, canceled his remaining performances.
[Mania] Harley Pasternak, his friend and former trainer, arrived at the musician’s house in Los Angeles that week to find him consumed with paranoid thoughts, including that government agents were out to get him. He was writing Bible verses and drawing spaceships on bedsheets with a Sharpie, while a handful of worried friends and employees lingered nearby. [while doing nothing & enabling West; cf. death of Tony Hsieh] When Mr. Pasternak encouraged him to come to a nearby office he owned, Mr. West emerged with suitcases packed with pots, pans and Tupperware. Mr. Pasternak, who later provided an account of the incident in a deposition for Mr. West’s touring company as it sought insurance payouts for the canceled shows, took him to the office. A psychiatrist from U.C.L.A. Medical Center and another doctor were among those called to the scene. After observing Mr. West’s behavior escalate—at one point he threw a bottle, breaking a window—the doctor called 911. “I think he’s definitely going to need to be hospitalized”, he told the operator on a recorded call.
…After more than a week in the hospital in 2016, Mr. West began taking medication to treat bipolar disorder and kept a low public profile. But by the spring of 2018, he was off the meds, insisting that they dulled his creativity. While over the years he has talked publicly about having bipolar disorder, even referring to it on an album cover, he has at other times claimed that he was misdiagnosed.
…Along with some other rappers who came up in the 1980s & 1990s, Mr. West had been drawn to Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and his commitment to Black empowerment. Some of those musicians also adopted the organization’s antisemitic beliefs, such as the claim that Jews control the world.
Mr. West, in a 2005 lawsuit in which he successfully blocked a D.J. from distributing unreleased songs from the 1990s, suggested that the work might have contained anti-Jewish lyrics. “My only concern with it would be to make sure that it’s like no anti-Semitist—is that the word?” he asked in a deposition. He implied that his views had changed, saying the songs had “gross lyrics that like might make me cringe now.” But years later, he continued to tell friends and associates, including several Adidas employees, that Jews had special powers allowing them to amass money and influence.
He was becoming closer to Mr. Farrakhan. When Mr. West had drawn criticism that he was perpetuating dangerous stereotypes in 2013 by saying “Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people”, the minister quickly came to his defense. The rapper went on to help him with a documentary about the Nation of Islam. His manager, Mr. Braun—the grandson of Holocaust survivors—told others in the industry that Mr. West made him attend a private dinner with the minister.
Mr. West also told some Adidas colleagues that he admired Hitler’s command of propaganda, viewing him as a master marketer.