Kanye West escorted out of Skechers offices after unnanounced visit
The company said it had not invited the embattled rapper, who has changed his name to Ye, and that it has no plans to work with him following his breakup with Adidas over antisemitic remarks
A day after Adidas announced in a statement that it had ended its collaboration with Kanye West (i.e. that it will no longer produce the Yeezy brand), the artist apparently started looking for a replacement.
The embattled rapper was seen at the L.A. headquarters of Skechers on Wednesday, CNN reported. The athletic footwear company later issued a statement saying that Ye “arrived unannounced and without invitation at one of Skechers’ corporate offices in Los Angeles. Considering Ye was engaged in unauthorized filming, two Skechers executives escorted him and his party from the building after a brief conversation.”
The statement insisted that Skechers is not considering working with West. “We condemn his recent divisive remarks and do not tolerate antisemitism or any other form of hate speech,” it said.
Following Adidas’ announcement earlier this week, the sports giant’s shares fell by 6%. The collaboration between Adidas and Ye represented between 4% and 8% of the German company’s sales, Forbes reported. In 2020, Yeezy (which includes apparel and sneakers) had sales of $1.8 billion. Adidas pondered what to do with Ye after his escalation of anti-Semitic, pro-Trump and racist remarks throughout this past month. Pressure from tens of thousands of social media users played a role in the decision to sever ties.
Ye had said “I can say antisemitic shit and Adidas cannot drop me” on the Drink Champs podcast earlier this month. Forbes noted that now that Adidas has, in fact, dropped him, the rapper “is no longer a billionaire” because the value of the Adidas deal to Ye was estimated at $1.5 billion. Other companies have since followed in Adidas’ footsteps, including Gap and Balenciaga. Forbes said that without Adidas, Ye is worth $400 million.
And in the meantime, he could also be facing a $250 million defamation suit from the family of George Floyd after the rapper claimed that Floyd died from fentanyl use, despite the evidence that he died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes, in a homicide that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. The officer, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of the murder in April 2021.
