In 2015, the artist then known as Kanye West – now simply Ye – gave a lecture at Oxford University, telling students, ‘We’re all creatives here, we’re all born artists. Some are artists of business, some are artists of composition.’ Which of these, though, is Ye? It’s a question many have been asking since the start of 2022, when the rapper-cum-fashion-mogul announced his new girlfriend – Uncut Gems actor Julia Fox – through a number of highly publicised dates and photo shoots, many of them linked to his business ventures.
Since meeting at a New Year’s Eve party in Miami, the couple’s relationship has been heavily documented. The publicity began with an Interview magazine photo shoot, which chronicled their second meeting via a dozen photos of the pair, from Ye dressing Julia to the two of them making out on the floor of a hotel room. It was accompanied by Julia detailing how Ye directed the shoot and surprised her with ‘an entire hotel suite full of clothes’. Nine days later, the couple did another shoot with Interview, the same night they hung out with Madonna and Floyd Mayweather. This time, in a Q&A, Julia said that, a few days after meeting Ye, ‘all my shit was in boxes, gone… It wasn’t like I was just packing up my old clothes, it was like I was packing up my old life.’
Though the photo shoots may appear like another couple entering the fray of OTT celebrity PDA – à la Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, and Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly – they have also set off alarm bells. First, because many of these ‘dates’ were PR exercises for Ye. The night of their second date, tabloids reported that Julia had been wearing Balenciaga out to dinner and at the shoot. Two days after the date, directly after the Interview feature was published, Ye announced a new collaboration between his fashion brand, Yeezy Gap, and Balenciaga. The second Interview shoot featured more clothing from the Spanish brand. Most concerning for cultural commentators is Ye’s interest in treating his partner as part of a performance.
This, of course, is not the first time he has styled his other half: infamously dressing his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, even flying to Paris during Fashion Week to change her clothes after seeing her in an outfit he didn’t like. This unique approach to romance feels especially extreme now that it can be contrasted directly against Kim’s new, comparatively private, relationship with Pete Davidson. Many of her fan accounts have noted Kim’s eagerness to experience ‘the small things’ she felt were missing in her relationship with Ye, concluding that she is experiencing them now with Pete – such as eating what she wants, dressing how she wants and enjoying a relationship with less performance, effort and grandeur. (Although, given this is Kim, we have to expect that most things she does publicly are still far from spontaneous.)
This, in fairness, is an easy conclusion to come to as we are drip fed images from both of these relationships – Ye and Julia in eroticised, designer images, orchestrated entirely by Ye, while Kim and Pete are pictured on the beach and eating pizza in sweats at New York diners. It’s a situation ripe for our judgement, given it features such flamboyant A-listers (lest we forget, in added weirdness, Pete shot a cover for Paper magazine with Julia in 2019). It also begs an obvious question: who would want to be controlled if they could have freedom?
Despite the temptation to judge, though, we can’t know the state of affairs inside these relationships. Julia and Ye have spoken openly about the intensity of their bond – on her podcast, Forbidden Fruits, she criticised the public inclination to think celebrity pairings are a stunt, and Ye rapped about her on a new single (which she also features on, briefly, shouting ‘who?’ in a verse about Ye ‘beating Pete Davidson’s ass’). Kim has never said she had issues with Ye dressing her nor has she said that he was controlling, even thanking him recently for introducing her to the fashion world.
As with any relationship in the public eye, it’s hard to truly decipher what ‘YeJu’ are like behind the scenes. Nonetheless, it’s entertaining. As Julia said of their second date, ‘I don’t know where things are headed… but I’m loving the ride.’