Censori'd
Bianca Censori never speaks. Cameron Hurst wants to know what Melbourne has to say about her.
The funniest thing about the international spectacle of Bianca Censori is that most people really have no idea where the girl is from. Censori is, of course, the Australian wife of the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. She is famous for going out in outfits that look as though they could be made from nothing but eco-friendly mesh produce bags and hair gel. She is also famous because she never speaks. To be precise: since her marriage to Ye in 2022, Censori has not spoken in public. The closest she has come to an utterance was probably on the red carpet at this year’s Grammy Awards, when supposedly expert lip readers hypothesised she said to Ye, “Alright, let’s go,” before dropping a gargantuan black fur coat from her shoulders and revealing her 360 degree surgically-modified body, covered by a translucent slip of gauze. “BADDEST BITCH EVER,” Ye posted later, thrice.
Censori’s rise to fame has been accompanied by frenzied media interest and speculation. Like a silent, impassive psychoanalyst withholding reaction from the analysand, Censori encourages the spectator to project whatever they want onto her. Some people think she is a victim being subjected to cultish humiliation rituals. After the Grammys, the Guardian columnist Moira Donegan essentially diagnosed her with Stockholm syndrome: “Censori’s consent and knowingness is not, actually, in evidence here; and even if it was, consent exists, often, even in situations of asymmetry and violence, even in situations where great harm is being done.” There are theories that Censori is a honeytrap fed—an undercover agent brought in by the FBI and the Mossad to act as Ye’s handler—and that she goes out nearly-nude because a suspicious Ye wants to be sure she’s not wearing a wire. Other people think she’s just chilling: a beautiful young woman making paparazzi performance art and enjoying the limelight. In The New Yorker, Naomi Fry argues that Censori’s entwined exhibitionism and muteness are a self-aware play with our current media environment. “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.”
Fry’s theory is astute, but it’s missing something. What she and most other commentators fail to understand is this: the reason Bianca Censori never talks is because she’s from Melbourne. In a very literal sense, speaking in public would reveal Censori’s Australian accent, and all mystique would be obliterated. The nasal Melbournian drone (“Nuarrrrrr”) would be more revealing than a nylon garment could ever be. Her accent can be heard in a bootlegged clip on the internet, wherein she gives a presentation related to her role as Lead Architectural Designer at Yeezy, Ye’s hybrid design company. One of her passions, she says, is “exploring the bridge between the physical and the meta [pronounced ‘me-duh,’ with Naarm vocal fry].” The intonation is an index of the place Censori grew up, both literally—Ivanhoe, Alphington, Kew; the leafy, wealthy suburbs in the city’s north-east—and culturally. Censori is a quintessentially middle-class Melbourne girl.
And, perhaps, with her silence, Censori is not just concealing these origins but protecting them, too. “We are just normal people,” her mother, Alexandra, tells the tabloid journos who harangue her while she's out shopping. In Melbourne, a city of five million people that can feel like a country town, people cannot stop talking about her daughter. Everyone between the ages of 20 and 50 knows someone who knows someone who knows Bianca, and the stories about her and Ye have taken on an apocryphal quality. Information is traded constantly, with anecdotes ranging from the utterly benign—she always preferred chai to coffee—to the utterly crazy and unverified—she didn’t sign a prenup but will get $5 million if they divorce! If you want to hear about Censori firsthand, just go to Gertrude Street on any given evening and shout: “Who around here is an architect?”
And yet, when it comes to speaking on the record, everyone goes quiet. No one can confirm anything. This is partly because anyone who comes into contact with the couple in a professional capacity signs a comprehensive non-disclosure agreement. (You might be surprised by how many people have done work for the rapper. Think of the most esoteric creative pursuit you can conceive of; someone from Melbourne has done it secretly for Yeezy.) But countless locals who haven’t signed NDAs have voluntarily taken a hit from the cone of silence. People who knew Bianca before she was famous nearly universally describe her as extremely kind and friendly. “She’s really lovely,” they say, over and over. “So nice.” Censori inspires loyalty and discretion. Still, they say, it’s so weird where she’s ended up.
Where she has ended up is weird. How did this sweet young woman from Alphington become the accelerationist goddess consort to a maniacal deity known as Yeezus, a once-great artist now ostracised from polite society and industry? Why does she stay so insistently mute? Despite the preponderance of NDAs and gag reflexes, when she is placed in the context of her home city, with all its scenes and foibles, it is possible to parse the silent woman’s motives more clearly, to catch a glimpse of truth flickering in the carnival mirrors. But who in Melbourne would break the silence? Oh, no, not me! I said firmly to The Paris End’s other Censori-obsessed editors. I couldn’t possibly… I am a serious writer who cannot be seen dabbling in this tawdry tale of international intrigue and implants. They kept pleading, relentlessly. Ok, fine. I’ll do it.
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Bianca Censori was born on January 5th, 1995. She is a Capricorn (sign of the goat) and one of three daughters. Alexandra, her mum, is blonde, fit, stylish, and private. Bianca’s father, born Elia, known as Leo, migrated to Australia from Giulianova, a small town on the east coast of Italy, with his family as a child. In 1982, after prior convictions of possession of a pistol and ammunition, he received a five-year jail sentence for possession of heroin. He served two. In 1991, his ex-wife, a woman named Faye Glascott, blabbed to the Herald Sun about Leo’s role in an underground gambling empire that had been bringing stacks of cash into their home. Everything was going well, Glascott said, until “Eris destroyed it with the murder.” In 1982, Leo’s brother, Eris, who had been in business with him and their other brother, Eddie, was sentenced to death for killing a waiter in Perth. He got out of it when capital punishment was abolished. “The Censori boys have known the highs and lows of living on the wrong side of the law,” said the Sun article.
Leo ended up with a game machine business called Ca$hbox Amusements at some point (the website says “Est 1970”). The business still has an address listed in Footscray. Google Maps says it’s closed. I visited; it’s still open, though there isn’t much insight to be found there. Ca$hbox Amusements is just a run-down, cavernous warehouse full of toys, the perfect place to source a human-scale Minion for your next event, if you’re looking. I asked a worker there about Bianca, but he politely declined to speak: more silence.
Censori went to Carey Baptist Grammar, a private school in Kew. She graduated in 2012. For a while, she worked at a cafe with a friend of mine who told me that the owner used to come up behind the female staff and whisper “I own your pussies” in their ears. Perhaps already planning an escape from having to work in places like this, Censori showed entrepreneurial instincts early on. She and a friend made a brief foray into the jewelry business with a crystal-centric brand named, presciently, “Nylons.”
She was sociable. She went to house parties; to the Spring Carnival horse races; to Rainbow Serpent, the mind-melting hippy psy-trance music festival held in the bush in country Victoria. Rainbow was a festival for people who liked to open their third eyes and party hard. In 2017, after one patron died of a cardiac arrest, the coroner found that he had alcohol, MDMA, MDA, ketamine, temazepam, oxazepam, atropine, cocaine, diazepam and Xanax in his bloodstream. He had also accidentally drunk amyl. Bianca attended the festival with her then-boyfriend, Nick Forgiane, a cherubic chunk of a lad who has only ever had good things to say since their break-up. “Bianca has always been bigger than Melbourne and we both knew this,” he is quoted as saying to shock jocks Fitzy and Wippa of Nova FM (presumably in an ambush scenario). “The girl is extremely talented and took the leap to go chase her dream of being a famous architect.”
This dream is essential to understanding Censori’s narrative arc. She studied architecture at Melbourne University, following the classic professional trajectory of artistically-inclined kids of migrant families (maybe law and medicine were out, but it was unfathomable that those school fees could lead to a failed career as an artist). My boyfriend lectured her there for a semester, and swears some of the ideas she discusses in the bootleg YouTube clip—about the potency of “the unbuilt”—come straight from his course. Ok, babe. In one university collaboration with the designer Dalton Stewart, she worked on a prototype for a modular ass chair, a folded sheet of silver metal with a seat formed, allegedly, from an imprint of her bum cheeks. She had chutzpah, too. I heard a story that, in a studio on “augmented reality,” Censori once contested a mark she was unhappy with in front of the whole class. The tutor offered to discuss it privately; she refused. After the tutor reviewed Censori’s assignment, she said that the reason she hadn’t received a higher mark was because she didn’t really understand augmentation. Apparently, Censori smirked, then pointed to her tits and made a retort to the effect of “Honey, I think I understand augmentation.”
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So far, Censori’s life sounds like pretty standard Melbourne private-school girl fare. How did she get from this to Mrs Yeezy? This is where things start to get a little hazy. It is a confirmed fact that Ye sometimes finds new talent via Instagram. It is also in the public domain that Ye has offered to pay those close to him for various body augmentation procedures. People I spoke to wondered if something similar might have occurred with Bianca. A DM, a job offer, a $200,000 BBL bonus?
Ye was reportedly, at the time, a difficult person to work for. One former Yeezy employee who evaded signing an NDA, designer Pierre-Louis Auvray, recently told fashion blogger Louis Pisano that the company was “like a cult”: full of people who started texting and speaking in the same cryptic idioms as their boss. The New York Times reported that the Yeezy unit within Adidas put their employees who dealt with Ye directly on a rotating roster, because “working with him took a toll.”
Censori’s personal experience in the workplace remains unknown, but whatever happened, she stuck it out. Part of her fortitude may have come from her network of old friends. She kept up connections with an expanded Melbourne crew, a gaggle of hot, hustling scenesters with varying levels of “creative industry” success. One of her close friends is Gadir Rajab, Melbourne’s most jacked stylist. Rajab and Raquelle Saba (handle: Red Shiraz) had recently founded “Raga Malak,” a clothing label with the slogan “Too Arab in the West, too Western in the East.” The pair resemble Lebanese-Australian Barbie and Ken dolls, and their brand seems to do a roaring trade selling distressed camo print caps and frothy white lace sets to Doja Cat and other pop stars. Raga Malak has a distinctive sensibility, extracted from Melbourne’s club kids and micro-labels, though some of the more recent Bianca-fied garments look positively orthopedic.
Another character in this extended universe is Tyrone Dylan Susman, muse to the fashion designer Rick Owens. Ty is a himbo extraordinaire, who has nipple-length boho blonde locks and intense lip filler. He seems to only ever wear head-to-toe Rick. Lastly, there is Liz Cambage, who is by all reports a true alpha female of the scene. Cambage is a 6 ft 9 professional basketballer who did stints in the WNBA and currently plays for a team based in Chengdu, China. She left the Australian national team after being involved in an altercation with the Nigerian team wherein she allegedly racially abused the players, telling them to “go back to your third world country” (Cambage denies having said this: her father is Nigerian; her mother is Australian and, incidentally, a former CEO of the Australian Institute of Architects). Cambage also DJs and does OnlyFans. One friend recalled being at many house parties with this crew back in the day—the kind of parties, they said, where you could look across the room and see Liz in a hot pink cowboy hat and pink bikini kissing a guy a full foot smaller than her. Parties where people might have taken videos of each other dancing to Kanye and Jay Z’s “N****s in Paris” in the early hours of the morning.
Censori could have been a bit player in this broader circle of designers, models, and other kethead hanger-ons, were it not for what happened next. At some point in 2022, she reached a crossroads. She could stay in LA, potentially do a few iterative drawings for the Yeezy experimental homeless shelter pods (look them up), then call it, and move onto the next thing with a new line on her resume and an NDA-clamped story to tell. Or she could marry her boss.
There were a few red flags. Ye was in the midst of divorcing the ex to end all exes, Kim Kardashian, the unfathomably famous ur-type of this century’s suctioned, contoured, slicked, and smoothed beauty ideal. The couple had four children together. He had also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and spoke publicly of his fraught relationship with treatment and medication. More and more reports were emerging that he was acting extremely erratically, both in public and in private. He was in the process of losing a multi-billion dollar contract with Adidas after years of strange, often illegal behaviour, including showing employees porn videos in the workplace. He was trolling, trolling, trolling, seemingly in compulsive, self-destruct mode—producing “White Lives Matter” shirts for Paris Fashion Week, wearing a MAGA hat, going on Alex Jones zipped up in an opaque black face sock, posting that he was going to go “defcon 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” posting an apology to the Jewish community in Hebrew, then posting that he regretted apologising, beginning the cycle again. Was this man really husband material?
She said yes. In December of 2022, reports emerged that the pair had married in an unofficial private ceremony. The press started referring to Censori as Ye’s “wife.” Then, in early 2023, when a certificate materialised, they dropped the quotation marks. Ye kept being a walking embodiment of Godwin’s law. Censori began her unconventional, extended Vipassana silent retreat and stopped posting on Instagram (she kept her LinkedIn profile, which listed a gmail address I contacted requesting an interview. She did not reply). Almost as soon as they were married, reports emerged of impending Censori-West divorce. To this day, the rumours appear like clockwork after every major controversy. Denials always follow. No bonafide separation has yet materialised.
Actually, the couple often seem madly in love, or at least to have a genuine attraction to one another underpinned by exhibitionist power games. Ye wears oversized, monkish clothes that often conceal his face, and is unilaterally effusive about Bianca; she remains disrobed and silent, flashing a bright white smile every now and then. Their visual chemistry is epitomised in the cover of Ye and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures 1 album, which features the couple posed side by side in typical nudist x sharia law, yin yang formation. “Happy birthday to the most beautiful super bad iconic muse inspirational talented artist masters degree in architecture 140 IQ,” Ye wrote last year (Mensa is 132, minimum). It’s impossible to know whether Censori privately reciprocates Ye’s public outpourings of adoration—throughout all his outbursts, she just keeps saying more of the same nothing. The most convincing evidence that she loves him is the fact that she hasn’t left yet, and the number of pictures of them kissing at parties.
I rewatched the footage of Bianca’s 30th, held on a tropical island at the start of the year. A small group—including Cambage the basketballer and Rajab the stylist—had gathered in a giant, blue-lit tent to celebrate the occasion. Bianca was looking voluptuous in one of her usual tape-centric outfits, standing up on a stage, licking Ye’s face. The party looked empty and lifeless—like a bad Melbourne kick-ons, one where if your friend texted for a vibe check as you rocked up, you’d reply saying “going to bed now probs dont bother.” A bad Melbourne kick-ons, except there was glistening orange salmon sashimi, a metres-high white cake, and abundant streamers. And Penelope Cruz was there, gyrating. And instead of some DJ playing old Kanye hits from a grimy USB stick, it was the real Ye, looking like the hostess’s cute but slightly oddball, mature-age boyfriend, rapping along with a mic. He directed the scattered gathering to jump up and down to his songs. They obeyed. One video started with the unmistakable intro bars of “Runaway”: the sound of a single out-of-tune piano key being hit over and over again. All the attendees swayed back and forth awkwardly, grinning when a camera turned on them. “Run away from me, baby… run away fast as you can.”
In early February, just after the Grammys red carpet naked dress pictures dropped, and bored on a busy peak hour tram, I logged on to X. Ye was on a posting bender. Some of his natterings could be interpreted as having the perversely charming rhetorical flourishes of an infatuated lover:
Ye who's your top five baddest bitches of all time
My wife
My wife
My wife
My wife
My wife
My wife demoralizes bitches.
I scrolled further. Not all the content was so romantic. “IM A NAZI.” “I LOVE HITLER.” Extremely graphic sexual video. Another extremely graphic sexual video. I quickly pocketed my phone. I didn’t want to get arrested on the tram. And even if I hadn’t been in a public place, I didn’t really want to be looking at this stuff. It was just kind of depressing—an insight into the mind of someone who seemed wired, desperate for attention, and like they’d been awake for two days. It gave me a headache after five minutes, even after engaging from a distance. Yet Bianca is locked in 24/7. How can she stand it?
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I like to think that, if it all got too much, Censori could just fly back to the shelter and security of Melbourne. This peripheral southern city and its whispering populous are at a safe distance from the vicissitudes of Yeezyworld. She could still go out for dinner with her family at Marios Cafe, an old school, starched tablecloth institution on Brunswick Street, and order the carbonara—apparently last time she was in town she went to Marios and ordered the carbonara—and no one would really bother her. She could even bring Ye. He might finally be at peace sitting placidly at a corner table, slurping spaghetti up through a hole in one of his face-enveloping hoods, receiving the same kindly service from the besuited waitstaff as anyone else. Melbourne is a card Censori keeps up her metaphorical sleeve—tellingly, she renewed her Australian Business Number in December of 2023—but she doesn’t need to rush home. If I know anything about the Marios menu, the carbonara will still be there in a few years.
Given the steady, homely environ Censori comes from, it does not seem likely, to me, that she has forfeited her autonomy and architecture career to become a sex slave. If anything, the fact that so many people seem desperate for this dark projection to be true reveals our society’s paranoias and fixations about women. For now, she seems to be a willing participant in the cultivation of her own mythology. There is something equally grotesque and inspired about all the pictures and videos of Censori. They’re unsettling—purposefully so. And they fit into a pattern, wherein Ye enters into a relationship with a woman with whom he then collaborates with in the production of their public image. His greatest projects in recent years have not been music, but avant-garde content strategy: art with fame and femininity as the core materials.
Many have noted that Bianca bears uncanny resemblance to Kim Kardashian. Their outfits over the past decade riff on and refine the same aesthetic. Call it abject shapewear. In 2015, Ye and Kardashian collaborated with the fashion photographer Jürgen Teller on a shoot where Kim appeared nearly nude in black and flesh-toned hosiery and lingerie, posing against a pile of rocks in the French countryside. In 2023, in Florence, Censori walked for the Italian press in stilettos, flesh-toned hosiery, and with a single purple hotel cushion held across her breasts. In 2025, Kardashian posted an image of herself in a SKIMS bodysuit with her hair slicked back and dyed black, in a style that looked eerily like Censori’s. “A Bianclone?” “Biancaaaaaa,” went the comments section. The caption was a single white love heart. This is a dispersed, cinematic game of representation; the two women appear like the doppelgängers of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, only their similarities play out silently over time through paparazzi snaps and self-produced photographs distributed on the internet, instead of on the silver screen. The constant content creation is also a business decision—a way to, in a frazzled attention economy, translate the ephemeral capital of eyeballs into cash through the sale of undies, shoes, and t-shirts.
Censori does not seem like a girl who would stick around solely for the pleasure of roleplaying as another Yeezy readymade. Others who know her, or at least know the social world from which she emerged, tended to agree. “If you’re like her—you’re hot, you’re smart, maybe you’re a bit ADHD, you get bored easily—then you end up being drawn to this kind of man,” one friend speculated. “Someone who is, sure, maybe a bit crazy, but at least keeps you guessing and keeps you entertained. If she stayed in Melbourne, she would have probably ended up dating the same kind of guy, but worse. At least now she has a good lifestyle.” This was pragmatic, but also a bit grim.
Another friend expressed admiration for the way Bianca has kept schtum for so long. “It’s so boss that she doesn’t speak,” she said. It seems almost fated that Censori’s name brings to mind “censorship”—the suppression of speech, ostensibly for the purpose of maintaining civic order—which etymologically derives from the Latin word given to Ancient Roman magistrates who served as the adjudicators of public morality. Ye tests the limits of free speech. Meanwhile, Censori’s inner life is self-censored, inscrutable, concealed behind a veneer of mystery. Her extreme position is taboo and desirable in a time where people feel under tech-platform-induced pressure to maintain a public profile and make public utterances, even if they are essentially a nobody in the grand scheme of things—especially if they are a nobody in the grand scheme of things. The choice has a quasi-spiritual potency. It is as though Censori has joined a religious order and taken a vow of silence. This gives her a strange power in relation to Kanye’s constant chatter. He gives himself away all the time, humiliating himself with speech that seems to come straight from the id. She never does. He looks like a fool (except when he looks like a prophet; see: Bush era). She remains cryptic.
There’s an element of cynical cope to this reading though. Censori stays dumb—as women have been forced, not chosen, to do throughout history—and her powerful husband just can’t shut up. Maybe the dynamic isn’t transgressive at all. Censori also gets to protect herself from any of the potential implications of Ye’s rantings, even as her muteness and her strange nakedness act as a kind of stage and amplifying megaphone. Say something, Bianca! Anything.
Yet it isn’t actually true that Censori never speaks. Instead, unlike other celebrities, she chooses not to manufacture the illusion of speaking authentically in public. She still speaks to the people she trusts. She still has things to say over dinner, when directing projects, and to her friends and family members. The things she says to these interlocutors are valued (or legally constricted) enough that they decline to repeat them to probing journalists, though I did hear a story that when Ye visited Melbourne, in a hemispheric role reversal, he barely uttered a word.