Adidas allegedly created a ‘Yzy hotline’ to manage Kanye West
nme.coma series of remarks from the rapper last year that were viewed as antisemitic. The two had collaborated on the Yeezy brand for years.Now, according to a new report shared by the New York Times, a group of employees for Adidas supposedly started a text message chain to air out the problems in their collaboration.Called the ‘Yzy hotline’, the chain began in 2018 and featured a number of executives and managers from the brand.
It was reported by the outlet as an “ongoing effort to help Mr. West, contain him, or somehow do both.”According to examples shared in the article, one manager wrote a message saying West “doesn’t understand how his money works and he only trusts adidas,” after having a call with the musician in 2019.Other messages reported allegedly saw the employees become concerned with the musician’s “shifting, outsize expectations and his vehemence in their private dealings”, and saw Jim Anfuso – the general manager of the Yeezy unit – tell the executives that he favoured paying West to make a clean break.It remains unclear whether the issues discussed on the ‘Yzy hotline’ ever reached Adidas’s supervisory board, and the New York Times confirmed that both a company spokeswoman and former CEO Kasper Rorsted declined to comment on the reports.
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