Adidas and Ye’s multi-billion dollar partnership is officially under review.
Around noon today, Adidas issued the following statement:
Adidas has always been about creativity, innovation and supporting athletes and artists to achieve their vision. The Adidas Yeezy partnership is one of the most successful collaborations in our industry’s history. We are proud of our team that has worked tirelessly throughout our collaboration with Ye and the iconic products that were born from it. We also recognize that all successful partnerships are rooted in mutual respect and shared values. After repeated efforts to privately resolve the situation, we have taken the decision to place the partnership under review. We will continue to co-manage the current product during this period.
This doesn’t appear to reflect a change in how Yeezys are sold yet. Multiple retailers that Complex reached out to said they are still permitted to sell the shoes, and email marketing from Adidas and Yeezy Supply was still advertising Yeezy sneakers as recently as this morning. An Adidas spokesperson declined to clarify how the review period would change its relationship with Yeezy in the short term.
Ye has since responded to the news on Instagram. “FUUUUUUCK ADIDAS I AM ADIDAS ADIDAS RAPED AND STOLE MY DESIGNS,” he wrote.
Adidas’ announcement comes after a particularly controversial month for Ye, who’s spent much of the last few weeks on social media calling out partners including Adidas and Gap, the latter eventually announcing it would “wind down” the collaboration after Ye’s lawyers accused the company of breaching their contract.
Ye began airing his recent grievances with Adidas in June, when he called out the Three Stripes for producing “fake Yeezy” slides. His June posts called out soon-to-be replaced Adidas CEO Kasper Rørsted as well as senior vice president and general manager Daniel Cherry III, saying he wanted to speak with Rørsted directly rather than Cherry.
Cherry would again become the target of Ye’s posts in September, with the Yeezy founder suggesting Cherry had been making decisions for the Yeezy brand without Ye’s approval. Ye also repeatedly called out members of Adidas’ supervisory board during this time, posts that he claimed were removed by Instagram due to their aggressive nature.
This week, Ye has managed to drum up more controversy by featuring a “White Lives Matter” t-shirt in his YZY SZN 9 show at Paris Fashion Week. After the t-shirts were criticized by Vogue global contributing fashion editor at large Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, who was in attendance, Ye doubled down on the decision to feature the message and proceeded to attack Karefa-Johnson on social media.
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