Days after Kanye West’s Yeezy site started selling only one product—a white T-shirt imprinted with a black swastika—Shopify stopped processing Yeezy orders and deactivated the Yeezy site Thursday, Feb. 13. Susan Scafidi, founder and director of Fordham Law’s Fashion Law Institute, speculated to Women’s Wear Daily why the e-commerce platform made the decision to do so.
Susan Scafidi, founder of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham University, said that while unlike in Germany, “it is legal in the U.S. to sell items that use the swastika to advocate Nazism, the T-shirts may have violated Shopify’s ‘Acceptable Use Policy,’ which prohibits actions that ‘breach the social contract of commerce,’ including advocating violence against specific groups.”
She said, “Shopify reserves the right to terminate any account that violates its AUP, and arguably Ye’s T-shirts coupled with his public statements did just that.”
Scafidi said the “Coming Soon” message on the Yeezy site could “simply be due to the lack of having back-end merchant services to keep it running. It could also be that Ye is more interested in provocation than commerce at the moment. One thing is for sure: his followers will keep hitting ‘refresh’ until the next drama emerges.”
In 2021, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation to ban the selling or displaying of hate symbols on public property and taxpayer-funded equipment.
Considering that Shopify isn’t “just an anonymous back-end merchant service provider, but a company with a brand name in its own right,” the company has a strong interest in protecting its reputation, according to Scafidi. She speculated that “the outcry over Ye’s T-shirts likely caused internal concern and led Shopify to use contractual means to protect its reputation.”
Scafidi added, “Like other companies before it, Shopify chose to distance from Ye before being blamed for his statements,” an apparent reference to Adidas and other brands that have parted ways with the musician.
Although Ye still has “a significant following, apparently including fans ready to buy whatever he puts on a T-shirt,” Scafidi said it may be increasingly difficult for him to find fashion business partners, who are “willing to risk working with him, even if they’re providing something as general as e-commerce services.”
Read “Kanye West’s Yeezy Site Now Has ‘Stores Coming Soon’ Message” on Women’s Wear Daily.