It’s been a tumultuous year for Sean “Diddy” Combs and those in his orbit, which was punctuated this month with his once-promising fashion line, Sean John, appearing to have had its website wiped from the internet.
Internet archives indicate the site’s removal took place sometime between May 3 and Saturday, when The Daily Beast discovered its domain—seanjohn.com—now directs users to an “under construction” page that links to seedy webpages seemingly not associated with the brand. It appears to be the first time the domain has been in such a state since it went live in 1999, the archival service Wayback Machine shows.
It’s unclear if the site’s deactivation is temporary, permanent, or merely an extremely bad technical error.
No matter the reason, it appears to be the latest sign that Combs’ empire is crumbling amid revolting allegations of sexual assault, rape, and, most recently, the emergence of a security video of him allegedly shoving down and kicking his prone ex-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, with seemingly full force in a hotel hallway in 2016.
All of Combs’ ventures have taken a toll amid the allegations and Sean John, launched in 1998 and sold in Macy’s as recently as November, appears to be on life support.
Sean John’s website, once flush with moderately priced pieces of fashion from tracksuits to COVID-19 masks, has been a shell of itself since the spring of 2022, when, for months, it displayed a “coming soon” message in white lettering over a blank, black screen.
By May 2022, the website was redesigned to have its logo centralized along with text, in all caps, “I got my name back,” a likely reference to the brand’s name being inspired by Combs’ birth name. This shift came just months after Combs purchased the brand back in 2021—after it went into bankruptcy—with a winning bid of $7.5 million. That purchase came five years after he sold a 90 percent stake in the company while its annual retail sales were totaling as much as $450 million.
While Combs returned to Sean John’s helm, and the brand remained on sale at both Macy’s and—for much cheaper—at Walmart, according to Fox Business, the website never returned to its former self. It spent the second half of 2022, the entirety of 2023, and start of 2024 with the same mostly-blank homepage—its only hyperlinks going to its Instagram account and a contact form.
Now, even that whimper of a website appears to have been nixed. Reps for Sean Combs, including his longtime PR director Nathalie Moar, did not respond to emails, calls, and messages seeking information about the status of Sean John and its website. With its website gone, it is unclear who runs Sean John’s communications department, or if it has one at all.
Combs has remained largely tight-lipped about his recent scandals. His last major public contribution to Sean John came a year ago—when he popped up at the 2023 Met Gala draped in an all-black ensemble designed by his floundering fashion company.
A LinkedIn page for the brand still appears active, and some employees, many of whom denied interview requests or did not respond to texts and calls from The Daily Beast, still list the brand as their current workplace.
A Sean John Instagram page remains online, but has no posts. It follows just eight people, including Combs and its parent company Combs Global, and links to its now-defunct website. It still allows users to tag it in posts to appear on its page, which has been taken advantage of by semi-explicit spam pages and people rocking pieces of Sean John from its heyday.
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