Where do we start with Bianca Censori, the Australian model, “head of architecture” at Yeezy, wife of Kanye West, and near-naked woman on the Grammys red carpet? On Sunday, Bianca stepped out in a black fur coat—so far, so fashion—which she soon dropped to reveal a slip so sheer, so without undergarments, that it exposed her uncensored nudity beneath. Kanye, on the other hand, wore a black T-shirt and trousers.
Days later, the questions we’re all asking in the wake of the look circle around Bianca’s sense of autonomy, her sense of liberation, her feminism, our feminism, and her level of complicity in the way she’s showing up on the world stage.
Though she’s apparently brimming with body confidence—see Bianca in a nude bodysuit, clutching a hotel pillow over her chest in Florence; see Bianca wearing a transparent Blade Runner-ish raincoat with nothing underneath—her relationship with Ye, both romantic and image-architectural, has been criticized online as perhaps overly-influential, potentially verging on controlling. There are concerns about this particular woman’s silence: We’ve heard very little from Bianca during her Kanye tenure, a remarkably different situation from his relationships with the endlessly quotable uncut gem Julia Fox and his reality powerhouse ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.
Most of the women at the Grammys—in a year that felt overwhelmingly celebratory of female excellence—were there for their talent, for their loud-and-clear achievements over the past year. That said, the entire red-carpet mechanism sits on the surface level: We observe the looks—a carousel of perfect snapshots—and make our assessment about whether the dresses work. (Differences of opinion are part of the fun.) Deep-rooted, deeply old-fashioned standards for how women should act in order to appear “decent,” and in turn desirable (to men, to other women), have cast a long shadow on this practice. We’re all drawing our own lines in the sand as to what constitutes too much for a woman to show: what’s cheap, what’s tarty, what’s slutty.
At its best, fashion, for me, has always celebrated a body’s sensuality rather than the unimaginative, base-level provocation of a woman’s nakedness. But I have this sinking feeling that Bianca’s dress wasn’t meant to continue a fashion dialogue with other women—that it was purely meant to provoke.
