Kanye West Wrote Kim Kardashian a Check for $1 Million to Turn Down a Fashion Deal

When Kim Kardashian West was offered the opportunity to do a sponsored post with a clothing brand for $1 million, she wanted to know what husband Kanye West thought before taking the deal.

“It is great money, but the brand was typically knockoff Yeezy, so I said let me ask Kanye how he feels about it,” Kardashian West, 37, tells Ashley Graham on her debut episode of her podcast, Pretty Big Deal.

West, 41, told his wife to turn it down and she obliged. But to make up for the lost business opportunity, the Yeezy designer sent Kardashian West a $1 million check for Mother’s Day two weeks later.

“He happened to be recording out of town and I get an envelope delivered to the door. I open the envelope and it is a million dollar check and a note saying, ‘Thank you for always supporting me and not posting,’” Kardashian West says.

She adds, “My mom was like, ‘Are you going to cash this?’ And I was like, ‘You better believe I am going to cash this!’ I have no shame. I did feel bad, but two days later, I was like, cashed!”

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But that wasn’t the only big gift West gave the Keeping Up with the Kardashians star for Mother’s Day this year. The fashion designer and rapper also granted her an ownership percentage of his Yeezy brand.

“In the rest of the envelope, it was a full, thick contract to be an owner of Yeezy to my have my percentage,” Kardashian West says.

During her hour-long interview with Graham, Kardashian West also opened up about how she became a fashion icon — and what it was like for her before big-time designers were vying to dress her.

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“Nobody would dress me,” Kardashian West admitted. “It was like nobody. I remember Kanye taking me to Paris and bringing me into an atelier and seeing all this stuff and I was just so quiet and so nervous and so nervous to sit at a fashion show.”

She credits former Givenchy creative director and current Burberry chief creative officer Riccardo Tisci for taking a chance on her. “Riccardo was a big person in my life in fashion. He was the first person to dress me for the Met. He was the first person to dress me to do a shoot with me. He designed my wedding dress. He was the first person to really believe in me. And I am always grateful for him,” she says. 

But even then, the star still felt like high-fashion designers struggled to dress for her curves.

“I think people at first dressing me were like, ‘Woah,’” Kardashian West says. “Like, we don’t know what to do with this. We don’t know how to dress…literally they didn’t know what to do.”

She adds, “I will say probably my best fitting dress in the world was my Versace dress last year at the Met. The fit I have never fit anything like that.”

And the star isn’t the only one who loved her most recent Met Gala look — 5-year-old daughter North West is hoping to snag it from Kardashian West’s closet one day.

“I have all my Met dresses in an archive and I have the Versace in my closet,” she says. “And North actually went in and she’s always like, ‘Mom, can I have this when I’m big?’ She’s going through everything.”

She continues, “And she said, ‘Mom, I just want that gold cross dress that you have.’ And I was like, ‘Do you wanna wear it to the prom? You can wear it to your [prom]. Whatever fits you. You better hope that you’re somewhere near my height.’”