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Kanye West sued over missing menswear

By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 11 July 2022

Another day, another Kanye lawsuit. Last week it was the New York-based David Casavant Archive – which is described as a “private collection of the world’s rarest and most coveted garments” – that sued Kanye West, accusing him of borrowing and then failing to return thirteen “rare and esteemed” fashion items from said collection.

According to its official blurb, the Archive’s collection features “the work of conceptual menswear designers of the late twentieth and early 21st centuries”, but – rather than just displaying all those clothes in a museum, instead it “actively loans its pieces to carefully selected individuals who are significant leaders in contemporary culture”.

And those carefully selected individuals include Paul McCartney, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell, Travis Scott, Young Thug, 21 Savage, Solange and Lorde.

And, previously, West. He last borrowed items from the Archive in February 2020, paying a weekly rental fee to the collection until October that year. But since then the rental fees have not been paid and the items have not been returned.

With that in mind, the Archive filed a lawsuit with the courts in LA last week seeking $221,810 in unpaid rental fees and – if those thirteen items are not returned – an additional $195,100 to replace them.

West and his team “have not responded meaningfully to plaintiff’s numerous inquiries about defendants’ unpaid balance and the missing items”, the lawsuit states, according to Billboard. Instead, West’s reps have referred the Archive “to individuals without knowledge or authority to resolve the dispute” or told them to “send inquiries to inactive email accounts”.

Still, makes a nice change from all the unlicensed sample lawsuits, doesn’t it?