Going into Sunday evening’s 2025 Grammy Awards, Kanye West wasn’t much in the conversation despite his nomination for best rap song. But even as the show wrapped up without him winning, the notorious music and fashion provocateur managed to grab headlines for once again using his wife’s naked body to execute a red-carpet stunt.
As West has done many times before in the past couple years, he got his reported wife, Bianca Censori, to go undressed, or nearly so, in public, in order to invite shock, alarm and commentary.
Censori actually arrived on the red carpet fully covered in a black fur coat. West, meanwhile, also was dressed head-to-toe in a black T-shirt, pants and sunglasses. A report by the Daily Mail, citing a lip-reading expert, said that West commanded Censori to drop her coat. He told her to start “making a scene now.” After she initially balked, she relented after he told her, “Drop it behind you and then turn, I got you.”
“All right, let’s go,” Censori reportedly said. When she dropped her coat, she revealed that she was wearing a mini-dress that looked like a sheer stocking. It left little to the imagination.
While there have been conflicting reports about whether West and Censori were escorted from the ceremony, or left on their own accord, some writers lamented that the focus of the Grammys should have been less on West and more on young female performers, such as Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, “planting their flag as the future of this industry,” or on Beyonce’s historic win for album of the year.
Unable to ignore West and Censori’s stunt, fashion writers and cultural critics were left to ponder the rapper’s intentions, artistic or otherwise, to stage yet another provocation involving Censori’s body. They also speculated on how much his 30-year-old partner continues to be a willing participant in what The Cut called “some kind of humiliation kink for her husband.” As the Washington Post’s style writers also noted, West isn’t known to be a mentally well human being, having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and known for his public meltdowns and his antisemitic rants.
There’s one thing fashion writers could agree on: Censori’s outfit, such as it was, wasn’t necessarily that outlandish or extreme, given that the “naked dress” has become an eyebrow-raising fixture at the Met Gala, awards show red carpets and fashion runways in the past year, CNN reported. Celebrities such as Dojo Cat, Elle Fanning, Charli XCX, Charlize Theron and West’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian have all worn their version of a naked dress. But CNN writers Leah Dolan and Oscar Holland also asked whether Censori’s tiny, sheer dress Sunday night went from a “naked dress” to her being just plain naked.
Washington Post style writers Shane O’Neill and Anne Branigin also opined that the real provocation in Censori’s display might be “the power dynamics.” The “obscenity” of the display was the “juxtaposition of Kanye’s coverage versus Bianca’s nakedness,” Branigan said.
“Even the sunglasses he was wearing — standard for him and a lot men on red carpets — seemed like a statement next to her nudity,” Branigan said. “What’s weird about this discourse to me is that even if it’s ostensibly about Bianca’s outfit, she seems almost like an afterthought.”
O’Neill said that West might be making a statement, however muddled, about “the dynamic that you see up and down red carpets and in the entertainment industry: men can be neutral, women are offered up for consumption.”
Branigan added that West has himself participated in this dynamic over the years, including with Kardashian and his ex-girlfriends Amber Fox and Julia Rose. At events, he has been covered up head-to-toe, while accompanying a scantily clad woman, who also happens to be lighter-skinned. “Kanye’s oeuvre — his music, his interviews, his public appearances — have shown us that he’s very conscious of racial dynamics, but he’s also fixated on them in an explicitly sexual way,” Branigan said.
Meanwhile, Censori remains a bit of a cipher, even a non-entity except in her relationship to West, according to Branigan.
“Come to think of it, I don’t know if I can conjure up an image of what Bianca looks like alone,” Branigan said. “She’s always by Kanye’s side. In the public eye, she is always always, always in relationship to Kanye.”
The world first heard about Censori in December 2022, a month after West’s divorce from Kardashian was finalized, The Cut reported. West shared a track to Instagram called “Censori Overload,” implying that some woman named Censori had became his latest muse.
Censori and West were first photographed together in January 2023, with TMZ initially identifying her as a “mystery woman” and The Cut noting that she was more covered up and dressed normally in these early images. Censori’s LinkedIn page said that she graduated from the University of Melbourne with a master’s degree in architecture and began working for West’s design company, Yeezy, as “an architectural designer” in November 2020, The Cut reported. It’s not clear if she ever actually worked as an architect, but the New Yorker reported in 2024 that she was working for West in some capacity in a story that examined his destructive remodel of an iconic Malibu beach home.
Meanwhile, back in early 2023, reports began to suggest that the two had married in “some sort of wedding ceremony,” with the Daily Mail eventually confirming in October of that year that they had in fact gotten legally married, though their marriage license is “confidential,” The Cut said.
That summer, West and Censori began looking to garner attention for what appeared to be his styling of her in sheer body-stockings and other outfits that were pretty revealing, The Cut reported. West’s alleged fashion choices for Censori reportedly prompted an angry reaction from Kardashian, who told West “to never let Bianca dress like” that around their four children, the Daily Mail reported in February 2024. To Censori’s credit, she has only ever been photographed with West’s young children, “almost always comically covered up” in trench coats or fur hats, The Cut said.
But Censori’s public displays of near-nudity also reportedly prompted alarm from her friends and family in Australia over the past two years. In interviews with the Daily Mail and The Sun, sources close to Censori expressed concern about West’s “controlling ways,” including about what she ate. Friends told the Daily Mail saying they staged an intervention to convince her to leave him, while a source told The Sun: “He is a very difficult person to be around and work for, and Bianca has been one of the most patient people ever to deal with him.”
But as much as they’ve been the subject of breakup rumors in recent months, their Grammy Awards appearance makes it look like their relationship is back on track, along with her public displays of nakedness.