Bianca Censori’s naked Grammys stunt looks like clear exploitation

Bianca Censori went completely nude on the red carpet at last night’s Grammys. There’s been a quiet chorus of concern for Censori for a while now, but it’s about to reach a fever pitch.

Red-carpet naked dressing is hardly a new phenomenon. Rose McGowan dared to bare back in 1998 and Cher had been doing it long before that. Rose later described her VMAs’ look as “A silent protest”—it was her first public outing since being sexually assaulted—and while fashion doesn’t always telegraph something bigger when someone turns up completely naked, save for a mesh slip, a message will be sent whether the wearer intends to or not.

The message Censori signalled was unease. It’s a feeling shared by onlookers, too.

Bianca Censori wasn’t the only attendee at last night’s Grammys to don a see-through body stocking—Julia Fox wore one over a thong and a tiny bandeau (with a pair of marigolds, naturally). And while Censori’s outfit was the most controversial, I don’t think it was a lack of rubber gloves that made the whole thing so uncomfortable and grotesquely sexual.

Perhaps it was because Censori seemed so reluctant to shed her oversized fur coat that made the whole thing so uneasy. Maybe it was the fact she appeared to undress at the prompting of her husband Kanye ‘Ye’ West (the internet is abuzz with calls for a lip reader to decipher the pair’s seemingly tense exchange), or the fact that she kept tugging at the flimsy mesh hemline, an act so redundant it was painful to watch. I suspect my discomfort—and the collective unease of the internet at large—was an amalgam of all these things.

Censori might very well be a willing and enthusiastic participant in these naked stunts—if you Google her name, ‘outfits’ and ‘before Kanye’ are among the top searches—but we’ll likely never know given her seeming bid of silence. What we do know is that Ye is a provocateur and a man who seems to get off on degrading women.

Long before deep-faking had become part of the public lexicon, West’s 2016 ‘Famous’ video featured a naked Taylor Swift waxwork in bed with him and then-wife Kim Kardashian, and, admittedly a nude lifelike George Bush, amongst others. A legal battle over the song's lyrics—“I made that bitch famous”, in reference to Swift—ensued.

More recently, while Pamela Anderson is being lauded for her role in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, West posted a now-deleted video of a naked Anderson circa 2008 to ‘tease’ his new album “Bully”. The naked video was overlaid with West rapping the lyric “Hide yo bitch” over and over. These are just two examples in a long list of public controversies.

West also makes a habit of parading around his paramours and taking full creative control over their wardrobes, something campaigners have called out as a sign of coercive control. Both Kim Kardashian and Julia Fox have claimed that West instructed them on what to wear and how to act while wearing it. In an episode of The Kardashians, Kourtney remembers West saying her career was over and likening her to Marge Simpson because he disagreed with her outfit choice at the Wall Street Journal Magazine Innovator Awards. In the same episode, Kim spoke of being “so nervous” about wearing an outfit that wasn’t “pre-vetted first”.

West’s sartorial contributions to Censori have mainly involved her going out wearing very little and facing potential jail time because of it. She could also face legal repercussions for last night’s indecent exposure under the California Penal Code 314(1) and the pair was rumoured to have been escorted out. Perhaps this is the pair’s kink, but the visual juxtaposition of a fully dressed West and an exposed Censori is too stark to ignore. What began as quiet concern is reaching a crescendo.

West, for his part, has defended posting his wife in various states of undress on social media. To ‘celebrate’ Censori’s 30th birthday last month, he shared a naked video of her in the bath with the caption “Happy birthday to the most beautiful super bad iconic muse inspirational talented artist masters degree in architecture 140 IQ loving by my side everyday [sic] when half the world turned their backs on me…”

It would be easy to chalk this all down to artist-muse syndrome, as many have. The relationship between artist and inspiration has long been a complicated subject. And perhaps, Censori is one half of a performance duo; a twisted Gilbert and George if you will. She’d join a long line of female artists using their bodies as a medium. Marina Abramović, who West has compared himself to and collaborated with, has long used herself in performance pieces, notably 1974’s Rhythm 0 performance, in which she invited the public to use 69 objects, including chains, a hairbrush and knives, on her body. And yet, even if this theory—which ardent West fans swear by—is true, what exactly is the pair trying to say?

At the Grammys, every crevice of Censori was on display, even her sandals were crafted from Perspex with see-through thonged straps. If this is a means of personal expression or an attempt to challenge societal norms around modesty, sexuality, or public boundaries, the message is being lost in the medium.

Sure, it’s statement-making and it’ll spark a tonne of online chatter but without a clear artistic or social purpose, it’s little more than that and it diminishes the seriousness of the conversation around body autonomy.

The line between meaningful expression and exploiting shock value for fame has always been thin with West, now that there’s nothing left of Censori to show, perhaps it’s time they speak up. The fact that everyone else is speaking up for them does little to convince concerned parties that we shouldn’t be worried about a young woman who is increasingly known only in relation to her nude body and relationship with an older, famous man.

Questioning the motives of a woman’s fashion choices feels contradictory in a post-feminism era but with until Censori says otherwise, all we can go on is what the pair show us—Censori is all we see, yet Ye is all we can hear.