The Mute Spectacle of Bianca Censori

I’m going to be straight here: I love celebrities. I love thinking about them, reading about them, and writing about them. There’s also little that brings me more pleasure than spotting them in the wild. So I was giddy with anticipation when, while on a reporting trip to Los Angeles earlier this summer, I made a date with friends to have dinner at the Chateau Marmont hotel. The Chateau has long been known not just for its celebrity clientele but for its ability to provide that clientele with a space to convene without outside censure. (It is, lest we forget, one of the spots at which the President’s errant son, Hunter Biden, holed up for crack-cocaine binges.) Housed in a French Gothic-style castle, on a hilly street just above Sunset Boulevard, it’s a place where even a regular week night can provide a lucky civilian with some choice inner-sanctum sightings.

Things started slow: for the duration of dinner, my neck-craning attempts didn’t bear significant fruit. (The only celebrity I managed to spy—though the term might be a stretch here—was the reality-TV personality and property developer Paul (P. K.) Kemsley, the estranged husband of the Real Housewife of Beverly Hills Dorit Kemsley.) But after the meal I had a solo cigarette in the restaurant’s curtained-off smoking area, and, by the time I came back and rejoined my party at the reception area, things had turned around. “You just missed Bianca Censori!” one of my friends told me excitedly as I approached. “She took the staircase! She wasn’t wearing a top!” Apparently, I learned later, the no-shirt look was paired with tan tights and heels. With the sharp instincts of a cheetah on the savanna, I wordlessly turned to run down the stairs in hot pursuit. I careened through a hallway, nearly knocking over a small potted palm, and ducked into a parking garage, my eyes sweeping the area wildly. I burst outside and scanned the hotel’s entrance. But I was too late. Censori was gone.

Who is Bianca Censori? The name might not be familiar to people who aren’t dedicated readers of the Daily Mail, Page Six, or TMZ. A twenty-nine-year-old Australian who holds a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Melbourne, Censori is, admittedly, more of a celebrity by association than one in her own right. Since 2022, she has been married to Kanye West, who now goes by Ye: rapper, onetime Adidas and Gap collaborator, former Kim Kardashian mate, erstwhile Presidential hopeful, and, most recently, a professed admirer of Hitler who memorably promised, on Twitter, to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE.” (He later apologized in a Hebrew-language statement, possibly authored by ChatGPT.) Censori came into Ye’s orbit when he hired her to work on various design projects, most notably the renovation of the Japanese master architect Tadao Ando’s Malibu beach house, which the rapper purchased in 2021 for $57.3 million, and ultimately destroyed. (Per her LinkedIn profile, she is currently the head of architecture at Yeezy, Ye’s fashion brand.) But once her relationship with her employer turned romantic, Censori began to attract attention less for her professional achievements and more for her outrageous getups, which have tended to involve aggressive displays of nudity. She herself, in other words, has become her own design project, and, perhaps, her husband’s.

For the past several months, while out and about, mostly in Los Angeles, where she and Ye live, Censori has been wearing very, very little clothing. (It would be difficult to overemphasize just how little.) This has naturally been a boon to online gossip outlets, which have been updating the public on her looks seemingly moment to moment, in a tone of barely controlled frenzy. Just a handful of examples, captured by the paparazzi in recent weeks, with bonus parenthetical commentary from TMZ: a sheer, flesh-hued bodysuit, which she wore while out to dinner at Santa Monica’s Giorgio Baldi restaurant (“Boobs All the Way Out!!!”); a transparent crop top and booty shorts which she sported on a movie date (“Lets the Girls Hang (Again)”); and thong underwear, donned during lunch at the Chateau (“Look Ma, No Pants!!!”) The fact that Censori is built like a Vargas girl naturally adds to the wolf-whistle vibe of the whole affair. Even if she’s not fully bottomless or shirtless (as my friends promise me was the case at the Chateau), she comes pretty damn close.

Ye has a history as an impresario fond of taking charge of his partners’ looks. During his near-decade-long relationship with Kim Kardashian, with whom he shares four children, and from whom he’s been divorced since 2022, he famously helped transform the reality star from an early-two-thousands L.A. party girl into a sleek icon of European fashion-forward avant-gardism, dressed in monochromatic, futuristically snug garments, often designed by his own onetime-collaborator Demna, of the fashion house Balenciaga. “Styling Kim, that’s a language of love for me,” Ye said, although toward the end of their relationship, his growing commitment to Christianity seemed to turn him against her more provocative looks—a distaste that came to the fore in his reaction to her 2019 Met Gala Mugler corset dress, which he deemed, on an episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” “too sexy” for a wife and mother. Later, in the wake of his split from Kardashian, Ye dated the actress Julia Fox for a whirlwind few weeks—a courtship that included a new, techno-goth-tinged look for Fox, and some highly publicized, hands-on styling moments. Fox told Interview magazine that arriving at a hotel suite stocked with racks of new garments that Ye had prepared for her to try on “felt like a real Cinderella moment.” Yet some were quick to speculate that this was just another case of Ye flexing his Svengali muscles, and turning Fox into a “Kardashian klone.”

Censori’s near-naked public forays, too, have a bit of a Bianca-blink-twice-if-you’re-not-O.K. feel. Whether or not she is under Ye’s control—and who can rightly say—she is rarely seen without him. In a kind of game of opposites, during their outings, Ye is usually shrouded in heavy garments from head to toe—the husband’s clothed form highlighting the wife’s bareness, much like, say, a bow tie throws into higher relief the otherwise nude form of a Playboy centerfold. In February, for instance, on a trip to the studio, while Censori wore a clear-plastic raincoat with apparently nothing on underneath it, Ye had on a beige poncho atop a black leather jacket and gloves, complete with boots and a full-coverage bondage-style mask. If his look was giving “executioner,” hers put me in mind of the early-eighties sex comedy “So Fine,” in which Ryan O’Neal’s character accidentally comes up with a new fashion sensation: see-through, butt-cheek-revealing jeans. Censori and Ye, however, clearly meant no spoof; and though there is, admittedly, something a little ridiculous about their dead-serious theatrics, I have to admit that I find the purely visual impact that the couple has been able to achieve via their coördinated outfits impressive. It is, if nothing else, very effective styling, and a full-on commitment to a bit.

Of course, strategically revealed bare flesh is hardly a rarity in our time. To scroll our phones nowadays is to be bombarded by influencers in underboob-revealing bikinis, movie stars in cleavage-baring red-carpet looks, reality-TV personalities promoting their OnlyFans accounts, and pop stars in tush-exposing thongs. The cover art of Charli XCX’s new hit remix of her single, “Guess,” for instance, in which she challenges an interlocutor to “guess the color of [her] underwear,” features a closeup of a butt, cheekily peeking out from beneath gauzy swaths of lace. And yet, Censori has unlocked something new and extreme here. We don’t need to guess the color of her underwear because she is often not wearing any. (Or, conversely, she is wearing it as outerwear.) If most expressions of public dishabille traffic in titillation, in the playful manner of a striptease, Censori’s nakedness has a bluntness to it that has less to do with sexiness, and more with a kind of calculated shock. If part of our fascination with celebrities hinges on the tension between their visibility and their unknowability, Censori, in her way, is pushing that tension to the limit, as if to say: Here I am, entirely available to the gaze, and yet, somehow, still entirely enigmatic.