The controversy over Bianca Censori’s naked Grammys outfit with Kanye West

He didn’t win any awards at the Grammys, but Kanye West, known professionally as Ye, managed to make headlines on Sunday night after he and wife Bianca Censori’s eyebrow-raising moment on the red carpet.

As West stood by her side fully clad in black, Censori dropped her fur coat to reveal a naked dress that looked like a sheer stocking. Had the pair attempted to re-create the album cover for West’s “Vultures 1?” Had they been escorted out, as some early tabloid reports insisted?

Neither the Grammys nor West’s camp responded to The Post’s request for comment. Whatever the reason, the pair promptly left — only to emerge later at an after-party to pack on the PDA.

What to make of it all? Here, Style reporters Shane O’Neill and Anne Branigin discuss naked dressing, power dynamics and what the stunt really meant.

Shane O’Neill: I think the pearl-clutching about Bianca being naked is overblown and probably what she and Kanye where trying to get at in the first place. Functionally, there is very little that is different about what she wore compared with what was worn by Chrissy Teigen or Willow Smith. It doesn’t really show much more than J-Lo’s famous Versace dress or Rose McGowan’s VMA dress from 1998 or Rihanna’s crystal mesh dress from the CFDAs 10 years ago. I’m also disappointed that it was described as “obscene.” To be honest, Victoria Monet’s dress looked more obscene to me.

Anne Branigin: To me, the obscenity rests more in the juxtaposition of Kanye’s coverage versus Bianca’s nakedness. Even the sunglasses he was wearing - standard for him and a lot men on red carpets - seemed like a statement next to her nudity. 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.

S.O.: I think Kanye was well aware of all this. I assume he was amplifying 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.

A.B.: It’s not just the entertainment industry in general but Kanye specifically. We’ve seen these same dynamics before with Ye and ex-wife Kim Kardashian, and with ex-girlfriends Amber Rose and Julia Fox. He has this way of propping up his partner’s bodies while simultaneously hiding behind them.

A.B.: Come to think of it, I don’t know if I can conjure up an image of what Bianca looks like alone. She’s always by Kanye’s side. In the public eye, she is always always, always in relationship to Kanye.

S.O.: I’ve never heard her voice either.

A.B.: Like you said, there was a statement being made on his part, however muddled the message may be.

S.O.: All of this is tempered by the fact that signs point to Kanye being unwell. I kept thinking about that New Yorker story about him ripping out the walls and windows of his Malibu home. We as a culture really don’t know what to do when someone is both mentally ill and a genius. It’s even harder when the person is also spewing bigotry. I’m thinking of Roseanne. These are people whose work I love so much that I want to find a way to ignore or excuse their behavior, but I don’t know how to square that circle. Neither does our culture, obviously.

A.B.: Right! One of the many thorns we inevitably prick ourselves on when we talk about Kanye. Another thing sticking in my craw about this is that for a night that felt delightful, even revelatory, and maybe even brave, it feels like a special kind of sad to be talking about this attempted provocation than all the other things we could be chatting about. Like all the young women - Doechii, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter - planting their flag as the future of this industry. Like the Academy feeling as if it’s finally correcting course when it comes to recognizing Black artists (if only for one night). We had Chappell use her stage time to plead with labels for health insurance! Slotted alongside that, this thing Kanye is doing feels so old.

S.O.: That’s a very good point. You could read Ye’s MAGA hat as a provocation during a Biden presidency. It’s less clear what he’s pushing against right now.

A.B.: It’s also worth noting that we also don’t really know about Censori’s own participation or agency in this - I think it’s unfair to assume she wasn’t a willing co-conspirator, though the power dynamics between them also speak volumes. Shane, I do want to go back to a point you made earlier, though, about how flat this provocation came across from a fashion perspective. Why do you think that is?

S.O.: Well, to quote you, it’s old. Robert Altman put an all-nude runway show at the end of “Pret a Porter” in 1994. Anthony Haden-Guest wrote that Grace Jones showed up fully nude at Studio 54 so much that it became a bore. In 2003, Pam Grier said this about her work with the filmmaker Jack Hill in an interview with the AV Club: “You’re not thinking about some sort of Victorian handicap called, ‘Don’t show your breasts, it’s considered indecent.’” Nudity is still a taboo, but people have been challenging that taboo for a long time. You also used the word “flat.” I mean, the dress literally flattened her breasts. So did Chrissy Teigen’s. As I wrote last night, “the less you wear, the better it has to fit.” Willow Smith understood this.

A.B.: I want to live in the world where we’re gushing for 1,000 words about Willow Smith!

S.O.: I want to live in a timeline where we’re gushing for 1,000 words about Jaden Smith and his Transylvanian mansion headpiece!

A.B.: I was also thinking about how, in 2016, saying you supported trans kids was the default position of corporate America. But when Lady Gaga says it in 2025, it feels brave and bold, mostly because so many celebrities seem unwilling to engage with trans issues?

S.O.: I mean, I loved seeing Charli XCX having Alex Consani strutting beside her and Richie Shazam dancing onstage. Not for nothing, Shazam was among the friends given a Birkin by Kanye when he was dating Julia Fox.

A.B.: I think one of the reasons 2016 is on my mind is because talking about Kanye, more and more, feels like we’re talking about the past. So maybe it’s worth revisiting what his and Bianca’s message - if there was any - could have been.

S.O.: I mean, it looked like a Los Angeles old man/trophy wife couple that had been generated by slightly malfunctioning AI. If she had been wearing underwear, it wouldn’t have even registered as a stunt. It’s not blowing my mind, but it is interesting, if just from a dorm-room stoner “what even are clothes, man?” point of view.

A.B.: Right! The outfit, in isolation, truly doesn’t warrant much more than that. But it is a stunt we’ve seen variations of from Ye before. Specifically, red carpet appearances where he’s covered pretty much head-to-toe (often obscuring his eyes in some way, which feels like another layer of protection) alongside his scantily clad and - this is important - lighter-skinned partner. Kanye’s ouevre - 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. Based on his music, he’s maybe done a little bit of self-examination on this topic, but on a red carpet, these images almost read as a challenge: How does the world react when a powerful Black man totes a White woman as a trophy?

S.O.: That’s interesting to me. Not to give them too much credit, but if she had just worn a little black dress, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

A.B.: Exactly. What’s sad to me is that these elements of Ye - fetishization, fixation, provocation - have now seemingly surpassed his musical/cultural relevance. I keep thinking about our colleague Chris Richards’s piece, “The Pain of Giving Up on Ye.” Is this all he has left to give us?

S.O.: I don’t think so. I think he has more to say and I hope that he finds a way to make me hear it without cringing or worrying about him or despairing for the future of America. If nothing else, he could always make an even bigger splash if he shows up naked on a red carpet.

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Additional reporting by Herb Scribner.

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