What’s Happening: After a string of anti-Semitic remarks led Adidas to sever ties with Kanye West and stop producing Yeezy sneakers and apparel, the German sportswear giant now faces a $2 billion shortfall. A similar controversy is afflicting Nike with Kyrie Irving.

The Download: For major brands with celebrity deals, the past couple of months must have been eye-opening. Ye, the rapper and artist formerly known as Kanye West, lost multiple brand endorsement deals after making a string of anti-Semitic remarks and wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt, sparking widespread outrage. Gap and Balenciaga quickly terminated their partnerships with West; Vogue vowed to never work with him again. Conspicuously absent from the conversation was Adidas, which struck a lucrative deal for West to create Yeezy-branded sneakers and apparel for the sportswear giant back in 2013.

Though Adidas ultimately severed ties with West and stopped selling its Yeezy line one week into the fallout, many complained the brand didn’t act fast enough. That’s likely because the C-suite was evaluating the potential financial fallout of terminating its most lucrative celebrity partner. Adidas has become heavily dependent on Yeezy, which analysts estimate ballooned to $2 billion in annual sales, or roughly 8 percent of revenue and 40 percent of profit. Adidas is expected to tell investors how it plans to alleviate the financial shortfall on an earnings call today, and rebounding will likely become one of incoming CEO Bjorn Gulden’s biggest challenges.

“The saga of Ye, not just with Adidas but with brands like Gap and Balenciaga, underlines the importance of vetting celebrities thoroughly and avoiding those who are overly controversial or unstable,” Neil Saunders, an analyst at GlobalData, said in a statement. “Companies or brands that fail to heed this will get stung, especially if they become overly reliant on a difficult personality to drive their business.”

Adidas isn’t the first apparel brand grappling with botched endorsements, and it won’t be the last. But few companies have put all their eggs in one basket by entrusting an unaccountable public figure as designer and endorser of a billion-dollar product line. The German brand’s main competitor, Nike, recently suspended a shoe line with basketball star Kyrie Irving after he refused to disavow his endorsement of an alleged anti-Semitic film, Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, on social media.

The Brooklyn Nets player has since been suspended and apologized on Instagram—one of six apparent conditions he must meet in order to return to the team. And though Nike’s former executive chairman Mark Parker named Irving’s shoe line as a key component of the company’s basketball future, it pales in comparison to the company’s biggest asset, Michael Jordan, whose namesake line generates more than $5 billion in annual revenue.

Celebrity endorsements are high risk, high reward. According to a study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers, 75 percent of companies rely on influencer marketing—a crucial strategy to reach millennial and Gen Z audiences who avidly follow social media celebrities as trust in traditional media has dipped. But these deals can backfire if spokespeople are engulfed in scandal.

Still, it’s rare to see partnerships unravel with such furor. Because Adidas took its time to evaluate its financial situation before formally severing ties with West, experts predict its reputation will likely suffer. The internet was also quick to point out that Adidas’s two co-founders, Adolf and Rudolf Dassler, were both members of the Nazi Party, despite the brand having taken steps to distance itself from that troubling legacy over the years.

Stefan Hock, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Connecticut who has studied brands’ responses to backlash around celebrity endorsers, has found the timing of a company’s reaction can impact its stock price. Gulden remains unfazed, and hinted that more such partnerships are on the horizon for Adidas: “Every time you sign a partner, be it an athlete or an influencer or a rapper, it’s an evaluation of positives and negatives and I don’t think this event will change that.”

In Their Own Words: “The problem is, if you go down the rabbit hole, and you accept, and accept, and accept, and you look the other way, then you are, in a sense, co-signing on the behavior implicitly,” said Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School about Adidas’s decision to sever ties with West.

Surface Says: These episodes have clearly captured the public’s outrage and hurt both companies financially, Adidas more than Nike. But we can’t help point out that while both Ye and Kyrie’s embrace of anti-Semitic tropes should have consequences, and they are, both companies have a problematic history filled with things that have deeper real-world implications than celebrities amplifying conspiracy theories.

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During the pandemic lockdown, when the world screeched to a halt yet was in complete disarray, Steven Johanknecht was seeking balance. And the most fulfilling medium for the Commune co-founder to reckon with the dualities of “thought and emotion, order and tension,” as he describes, turned out to be through creating small paintings with repeated and repositioned patterns evoking the geometric patterns of vintage midcentury Scandinavian rugs. “I make all these moves until everything coexists with depth and intensity that seems balanced to me,” he tells Surface. “They paint themselves at a certain point.”

Two years later, the meditative paintings have received a second life as the Abstrakt collection of hand-knotted wool rugs. To translate his canvases into floor coverings, Johanknecht looked no further than Christopher Farr, the beloved American purveyor of made-to-order handmade rugs which, like Commune, has a lengthy history of collaborating with luminaries to translate their visions into unfamiliar mediums.

Unlike most traditional Swedish rugs, which are either flat-woven rollakans or shaggy ryas, using hand-knotted wool attains an unexpected texture and allows the Abstrakt series to fit seamlessly into a wide variety of interiors. That also goes for the campaign’s site at the Wright Ranch, a Brutalist structure designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s grandson, Erik, who tinted its concrete to match the sunset-hued coastal terrain of Malibu.

On Monday, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) hosted its annual awards show in New York City. The occasion honors defining members of the vast American fashion ecosystem, from designers and stylists to celebrities, and this year, even the United Nations.

Khaite founder Catherine Holstein was named womenswear designer of the year while Bode founder Emily Adams Bode Aujla, who was also honored at the Cooper Hewitt Design Awards earlier this fall, took home the menswear designer of the year award. Raul Lopez of Luar, the Surface-approved it-bag label if ever there was one, was this year’s honoree for accessories designer. The United Nations, meanwhile, received the sustainability award.

In fitting fashion, Anna Wintour presented the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Wendy Yu Curator in Charge, Andrew Bolton, with the Council’s founder award, so named for CFDA founder and architect of the fashion world as we know it today, Eleanor Lambert. In a touching tribute, the late Virgil Abloh was honored posthumously with the Board of Trustees Award.

Born in Beirut, raised in Paris, and inspired by centuries of his Egyptian heritage, Omar Chakil aims for his Animism-inspired sculptural objects to encapsulate all three cultures. The Cairo-based designer now reveals a series of hand-carved tables, lighting fixtures, plinths, and small accessories made in translucent, flesh-like Egyptian onyx marble—also known as Pharaonic alabaster, one of Egypt’s rarest materials—that embody the belief in all objects possessing a spiritual essence. Called “Suite Anima,” the collection will go on view at Le Lab Atelier’s booth at Salon Art + Design in New York this week.

When: Until Dec. 17

Where: David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

What: Jennifer Guidi’s canvases often possess a soft power achieved by the mandala-like patterns that ripple from a central point, which she creates by using wooden dowels to make hundreds of small indentations in repetitive circular patterns within a surface mixture of pigment, sand, and acrylic polymers. For the Angeleno artist’s latest outing at David Kordansky Gallery, she applies that logic to painted bronze sculptures installed in a rock garden–like setting, complementing newly unveiled paintings that both reveal a shifting array of moods and her nuanced understanding of light, color, and landscape.

Despite suggestions to the contrary, fashion’s interest in the metaverse is still alive and well. The industry’s newest obsession: gaming. Last week, Ralph Lauren announced it is teaming up with Fortnite to co-host a streaming tournament and create a digital and physical capsule collection, replete with a historic redesign of the 55-year-old polo pony logo. The timeless American label and popular role-playing game celebrated the launch in New York City with a VIP party live-streamed on Twitch.

Hot on the heels of Ralph Lauren x Fortnite, Burberry unveiled a collaboration with the world-building game Minecraft that includes an in-game and IRL capsule collection, and free downloadable content called Burberry: Freedom to Go Beyond that puts players in an alternate reality London.

Vivanterre is a natural wine produced in the Auvergne region of France by Patrick Bouju and Justine Loiseau, and founded by Rosie and Max Assoulin, with the support of renowned sommelier Cedric Nicaise. Using organically and biodynamically farmed grapes, vinified using natural processes, and untouched by any fining, filtering, or added sulfites, Vivanterre reflects the “Living Earth” from which it comes.

Surface Says: From its conscious agricultural practices to easy drinking blends and a bottle you’d actually want to see out, Vivvanterre exudes good taste.

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Milton Gendel’s archives reveal an American vision of 20th-century Rome.