Shopify will no longer be selling Kanye West‘s controversial swastika shirts on their platform, the site announced on Wednesday.
Following Kanye West’s bizarre Super Bowl ad, a visit to yeezy.com redirected visitors to a Shopify store that sold one single item: a white t-shirt with a swastika symbol on it. As of Wednesday, the site displayed an error message saying that the store was currently unavailable.
In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, Shopify said that Kanye had not engaged “in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify,” further clarifying that while they are an independent platform that allows sellers to sell their own goods, they have the right to breach contracts that they believe “call for, or threaten, violence against specific people or groups.”
Shopify general counsel Jess Hertz went even further, calling Ye’s presence on the platform a “stunt” and said that the item brought additional risk to the platform.
The controversy followed Kanye’s Super Bowl ad for the Yeezy brand- an ad that bizarre in it’s own right, featuring Kanye in a dentist’s chair getting what appeared to be fang veneers. The commercial directed viewers to his Yeezy website, which originally featured an assortment of clothing from his collection (none with the swastika sign). However, within an hour of the commercial airing, yeezy.com redirected to a Shopify store that sold only the controversial t-shirt.
The Super Bowl bait-and-switch was not Ye’s only controversial move that he made over the weekend, not even a full week after his wife appeared naked on the Grammy’s red carpet. He also posted statements on X (formerly Twitter) such as “IM A NAZI,” I LOVE HITLER,” and more, causing Elon Musk to restrict his account and label it with a sensitive content message. He also went on the “The Download” podcast and said that he was not bipolar as he had previously claimed, but instead was autistic.
