EDITOR'S LETTER

MARK GUIDUCCI

On a March afternoon in 2024, I sat down at one of the little tables in the Bar Vendome to meet a friend for coffee. He turned out to be 15 minutes late—a habit I've come to know as the "French Quarter"—but I hardly noticed because of the scene playing out in front of me. Across the room was a brunette seated alone in a booth, resting her elbows on the table, nursing what looked like a glass of water, and looking off nowhere in particular. It would have been entirely prosaic had she not been seemingly completely naked. I stared, questioning my own state of mind: What kind of champignons did they serve at lunch exactly? As unbothered as she was unclothed, this woman looked like Edward Hopper's Nighthawks meets Jeff Koons's Made in Heaven. But perhaps the artist who would have most easily imagined this scene was Salvador Dali. It wasn't until several minutes later, when a masked man and a few others (fully) dressed in various shades of black entered the bar and started heading for this woman's table, that I realized what was happening. Kanye West was joining his wife, Bianca Censori, for a drink. Perhaps the most stunning aspect of this memory is that until West and his clique entered the room, nobody else seemed to clock this situation. The French really are different.

I was not alone in my confused fascination with Censori. Last year she was the most googled woman in the world—a fact that she asked contributing editor Anna Peele to remind me of in a bid for her profile ("Censori Uncensored," which starts on page 90) to be upgraded to a cover story. Anna first met Bianca after guessing her personal email address and speaking off the record about her artwork. Censori, who has remained virtually silent since her relationship shot her into the tabloids—is it a coincidence that her name contains the word "censor"?—eventually decided to give Anna and Vanity Fair her first-ever long-form interview. Throughout their time together, Censori clarified her version of events and emphasized her own agency in all the decisions we've seen her make. Does Bianca Censori need saving? Only from herself, she would claim.

Censori's fashion, and lack of it, has elicited varying degrees of dismay and disdain from all corners of society, but her husband's own hateful expressions have caused real harm to numerous communities, innumerable individuals, and Jewish people everywhere. After we photographed Censori, her husband issued an apology (not his first), "To Those I've Hurt," in the form of a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal, claiming that his mental illness and psychological violence are the long-tail results of the same 2002 car accident that gave the world "Through the Wire," his breakthrough single that became a watershed moment for hip-hop. It is a villain's full-circle origin story that sparks more questions than it answers, and puts our profile of Censori into timely relief.

We could ignore both Ye, as he's now known, and Censori, but the truth is that they remain relevant—and we had the opportunity to learn and share more. None of this is polite, but it certainly is interesting.