CONTENT WARNING: NUDITY
The Grammy Awards can always be relied upon to showcase the wildest looks, and Sunday night was no exception.
For the world’s biggest pop icons, no effort or expense was spared, with Beyoncé stunning in Schiaparelli, Taylor Swift wowing in Vivienne Westwood and Sabrina Carpenter in JW Anderson.
But there was one guest who chose to eschew the flattering merits of a designer dress in favour of standing out in a different sort of way entirely.
No label was involved in the making of Bianca Censori’s dress, because it was by nobody, and was made almost entirely of nothing.
In a modern-day reworking of The Emperor’s New Clothes, Censori rocked up on the red carpet buck naked, every inch of her body visible for the world to see, discuss and dissect like a lab rat.
Which, to her husband, Kanye West, perhaps she is.
After this latest stunt, it’s hard to imagine that he has any sort of respect for the woman he married in 2022.
One wonders if their vows included insisting she “love, cherish, honour and obey whatever bizarre wardrobe diktats he chooses to issue”.
Censori seems to exist as some constrained and malleable creature for her husband to experiment on rather than being accorded rights and opinions.
There are those who would argue that Censori was exercising her right to choose by wearing a transparent dress or that her lack of underwear was some sort of feminist statement.
This would, perhaps, be more credible if she had looked more joyful or less scared.
Her facial expression was best described as blank, possibly because she was trying to forget the fact that millions could see her naked.
The psychiatric term is “dissociation”, which can occur when the mind is struggling to cope with stress.
By dissociating, you can disconnect from yourself and the world around you.
For the idea that any woman would freely choose to turn up naked to an awards ceremony, or anywhere else, is surely a fantasy – a male one.
It certainly seems to be an obsessive fantasy of West’s.
The Grammys is far from the first occasion Censori has been pictured nearly naked, although it is the most extreme.
In recent years, she’s appeared wearing sheer tights, a transparent black nylon bodystocking, minuscule silver shorts, nothing but duct tape over her nipples and a black leather leotard that barely covered her vagina.
This last look was at a Paris fashion show and caused guests to look away mortified.
However obsessed with nudity West might be, he’s less keen to reveal his own flesh.
Whenever he parades his naked wife, West is dressed in head-to-toe black with his face often barely visible behind dark glasses or a hood.
It must be nice to maintain his own privacy and anonymity by way of a camouflaging wardrobe.
What a shame he doesn’t accord his wife the same privilege.
More worryingly still, we don’t know how Censori feels because she rarely speaks.
She is clearly a woman who has a voice. Brought up in an affluent area of Melbourne, Australia, she attended the $38,000-a-year Carey Baptist Grammar, where former pupils recall her as a “social butterfly”.
At 18, she enrolled at the University of Melbourne, gaining a degree in architecture which led her to West, whose Los Angeles studio she started working for in 2020 as an architectural designer.
Highly qualified as she is, however, she seems unable to be the architect of her own wardrobe.
Her first outing with West was in January 2023, a few weeks after they wed. And it was clear her style had changed.
It was as though she was taking part in some private humiliation kink for his titillation.
Rather than her wardrobe signalling freedom and liberty, it appears to semaphore the opposite – control.
Coercive control, a form of abuse meted out via threats, humiliations and intimidation, can present itself in all manner of ways.
Nor does a university education preclude a person from becoming a victim. All it takes is meeting the wrong person at the wrong time.
Usually, that person is very charming at first, flattering their victim into doing what they ask.
It’s easy to imagine how charmed Censori might have been by the attention of a global superstar like West.
His lifestyle must have seemed very alluring: it even proved irresistible to Kim Kardashian, a celebrity in her own right, who was married to West from 2014 to 2021.
When it comes to exhibiting signs of controlling behaviour, West seems to have form.
In her memoir Down The Drain, former girlfriend Julia Fox detailed how West once asked her to change her clothes mid-date because he didn’t approve of her outfit.
It’s also been reported that West oversaw Kim Kardashian’s wardrobe during their marriage.
In the reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians, he is shown ordering her to throw out items from her wardrobe.
Censori deserves more than to be treated like this, a grim Frankensteinian experiment by her husband – although it is, of course, not just an experiment.
A highly skilled publicist, West knows how extreme he needs to be to grab attention when so many are competing for it.
Few things have the power to shock now. Nudity is one of them.
But women’s naked bodies are not to be paraded for the envy and delectation of others.
If Censori has consented, let her say so. Even then, it will be hard to know if she’s speaking freely.
If a controlling relationship is easy to fall into, it is difficult to escape.
Unless you have walked in those shoes, it’s almost impossible to comprehend.
As anyone who has experienced it will agree, the only good that can come out of Censori’s latest shocking look is that it raises awareness, not of West but of coercive control, abuse that too often is suffered in silence.
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