Kanye West Raises $1M For DMX's Family With Balenciaga Tribute Shirts
DMX was laid to rest over the weekend with not one but two different services. For Saturday’s (April 24) Celebration of Life, Kanye West brought his Sunday Service choir to the Barclays Center in Brooklyn where they sang their hearts out for the fallen Ruff Ryders legend.
But that’s not the only thing Kanye contributed. According to TMZ, his DMX t-shirt collaboration with Balenciaga netted roughly $1 million for the Simmons family. Listed at $200, the custom shirts sold out in less than 24 hours.
Swizz Beatz, who previously hinted at Kanye’s involvement in the memorial, posted the shirts to his Instagram account on Saturday.
“Thank you my brother KANYE & @balenciaga for this amazing tribute link in BIO,” he wrote in the caption. “long live the DOG.”
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Kanye West recruited renowned visual artist Akeem Smith to help with the stage layout for DMX’s Celebration of Life, which featured what looked liked two giant pyramids. Kanye and DMX were reportedly close and although Ye wasn’t seen publicly, sources say the Chicago-bred Hip Hop mogul was present during the Barclays Center memorial but “maintained a low profile.”
DMX passed away at White Plains Hospital in White Plains, New York on April 9 after suffering a catastrophic heart attack. According to Murder Inc. founder Irv Gotti, he was sold a bad batch of crack-cocaine laced with fentanyl.
“They said it was a bad dose of crack and they said some drug Fentanyl was mixed in with the crack and that’s what made him overdose,” he said in a now-deleted video interview with 107.5 WGCI in Chicago. “When when he got to the hospital, he got diagnosed with COVID and he couldn’t breathe — you know that COVID messes with your respiratory system — so that’s why he had to get hooked up to the ventilator. But they said before he did, they was, ‘His brain died.’”
A second service was held on Sunday (April 25) at a local church but was closed to the public.