Gigi Hadid has taken to social media to defend the journalist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson after Kanye West lashed out at the Vogue editor for her commentary on Kanye West’s Yeezy show during Paris Fashion Week. The show featured “White Lives Matter” T-shirts, which were met with widespread backlash from the fashion community.
Karefa-Johnson shared a text exchange with a friend as she digested her response to West’s runway selections, and she posted the dialogue as part of her Instagram Stories after the show was over.
Initially, she expressed her anger by writing that she was “fuming” and called the program “indefensible.” After that, she went on to explain that she believed West’s vision was off-base.
She is heard saying in the screen pictures, “He was aiming to show a dystopian society in the future where whites would go extinct or at least would be in such danger to warrant defending.” “However, the risk is that this exact assumption, the belief that white dominance is on the verge of oblivion, is what justifies mass imprisonment, murder on a large scale, and even the beginning of slavery,”
“I suppose I understand what he was trying to achieve; he was attempting to be a Duchampian.” The answer is no. It was really insulting, aggressive, and dangerous, and it didn’t even land,” she wrote.
In a later conversation, she referred to the T-shirts as “pure violence”: “There is no justification, and there is no art in this place… If you were to ask Kanye, I believe he would answer that the t-shirt included art, revolution, and everything else that was said above.
As a response, West posted a screenshot of Karefa-Instagram Johnson’s account along with images of the editor, in which he seemed to attack her beauty. He also posted screen pictures of chats from someone who is believed to be his design director, Mowalola Ogunlesi. In these messages, Ogunlesi cautioned him not to disrespect the writer, saying, “I also don’t think you should trash the writer. You may be able to have a meaningful discourse about the tee.
Gigi Hadid added her own remark to that specific post, and in it, she said to West the following: “You wish you had a portion of her brains. You have no idea haha…. If any of you genuinely has any significance, then it’s possible that she’s the only one who can rescue you from it. As if the “honor” of being asked about your program should prevent someone from expressing their viewpoint… Lol. You are both a tyrant and a clown.
Later, she elaborated on the matter by posting the following on her Instagram Stories: “I was trying very hard not to give that guy air time, but openly attacking someone who criticizes your work on your big platform is another level of silliness to me.” Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it yourself. If you can’t handle constructive criticism, particularly the thoughtful, nuanced, and empathetic feedback that GKJ offered [after] yesterday’s show, then you shouldn’t put your work out there for the world to see.
She proceeded by saying, “This is immature b.u.l.l.y.i.n.g behavior.” “It’s conduct that we’ve all helped to normalize by continuing to interact with this material for the purpose of vitality, site traffic, or even just pure curiosity, or whatever it may be. Enough. It is not a clever move. It does not hold any interest. It does not have any nuances. It’s not safe to do so.”
Karefa-Johnson was called “one of the most essential voices in our profession” by Hadid, and she concluded her response by saying that she could “teach that terrible guy in more ways than he knows.”
