Balenciaga’s holiday campaign has resulted in the opposite of holiday cheer. The luxury fashion brand has been receiving backlash since the launch of two separate Balenciaga ad campaigns released in the same week, and the imagery in one of them and context in another have been accused of being suggestive of child sexual abuse and pornography.
The first was the mid-November release the 2022 Christmas “Gift Collection” campaign. The campaign was shot by award-winning National Geographic photographer Gabriele Galimberti, and featured photos of children holding handbags that looked like teddy bears wearing leather harnesses and spiked collars with wine glasses near in some of the shots. Balenciaga promptly removed the campaign images, apologizing for the “offence [their] holiday campaign may have caused”.
In a statement on Instagram, Galimberti placed the blame squarely on the fashion house and wrote: “I am not in a position to comment [on] Balenciaga’s choices, but I must stress that I was not entitled in whatsoever manner to neither choose the products, nor the models, nor the combination of the same. As a photographer, I was only and solely requested to lit the given scene and take the shots according to my signature style. As usual for a commercial shooting, the direction of the campaign and the choice of the objects displayed are not in the hands of the photographer.”
As if that weren’t enough hot water, on November 21st, the brand released its Spring 2023 Garde-Robe campaign, which upon close inspection featured pages of the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in US versus Williams, which ruled that the promotion of child pornography was not covered by First Amendment rights. Sleuths then discovered yet another image where in the background, rests a book on the artwork of Michael Borremans. The Belgian painter’s body of work includes figurative paintings of naked toddlers playing with severed human hands and blood. Critiques kicked right back up, and #CancelBalenciaga clocked up hundreds of thousands of shares — underlining the power of social media to both build and bring down a brand in a matter of days.
After several days of calls for the most famous friend of Balenciaga to weigh in, on Sunday, Kim Kardashian added the weight of her voice, telling her 334 million Instagram followers that she is “reevaluating” her relationship with Balenciaga. The brand’s most prominent celebrity relationship was officially at risk. “The safety of children must be held with the highest regard and any attempts to normalise child abuse of any kind should have no place in our society — period,” she wrote. “As for my future with Balenciaga, I am currently reevaluating my relationship with the brand, basing it off their willingness to accept accountability for something that should have never happened to begin with.”
The backlash to the campaigns has certainly been swift and notably widespread, even spawning ever-growing conspiracy theories about satanic images being embedded in within the photographs.
Through tie-ups with mainstream brands such as The Simpsons, Adidas and Ikea, artistic director Demna Gvasalia has positioned Balenciaga as more accessible and familiar than some of its luxury peers – but this has also opened it up to criticism from circles far beyond fashion. Fashion at large has a history of stepping over the line in attention-getting attempts to be provocative. Typically, racially and sexually insensitive products or imagery stem from a lack of diversity in the decision chain. However, the Balenciaga campaigns step on the third rail of provocation. No one is unaware that child sexual abuse is wrong.
Vogue reported that this isn’t the first time the Kering-owned luxury brand has found itself at the center of controversy, particularly since Demna was named Balenciaga’s artistic director in 2015. A number of the brand’s provocative moments have been met with mixed responses. Some have been criticized for aestheticizing suffering — for instance, the snowstorm Autumn/Winter 2022 show held one week after Russia invaded Ukraine, a commentary on the refugee crisis which some thought was distasteful; or the destroyed Paris sneakers, which some thought fetishized poverty.
According to People magazine, the brand recently turned heads after cutting ties with longtime collaborator and supporter Kanye West after he wore a “White Lives Matter” shirt and publicly partook in harmful anti-semetic rhetoric. Additionally, some of the brand’s infamous past decisions have included putting heels on Crocs, selling destroyed sneakers for $1,850 and styling Kim Kardashian in a head-to-toe black bodysuit at the 2021 Met Gala. And now, celebrities — like Bella Hadid, who modeled in the Garde-Robe campaign — are being called out to cut ties with the brand.
In the aftermath, the brand’s leaders have yet to answer the central question: who conceived of and approved the campaigns?
In its apology, Balenciaga used the royal “we”, dancing around the central issue of where the buck stops for its creative decisions. “The two separate ad campaigns in question reflect a series of grievous errors for which Balenciaga takes responsibility,” the brand said. “We are reinforcing the structures around our creative processes and validation steps. We want to ensure that new controls mark a pivot and will prevent this from happening again.”
The Gift Shop campaign images are so provocative that it begs the question of how they passed muster with the many professional image managers behind a highly controlled luxury brand. In its statement on Monday of the campaign, Balenciaga said: “Our plush bear bags and the Gift collection should not have been featured with children. This was a wrong choice by Balenciaga, combined with our failure in assessing and validating images. The responsibility for this lies with Balenciaga alone.”
Not so for the Garde-Robe campaign. The brand said on Monday it is suing the production company that developed the Garde-Robe campaign, North Six Inc, and set designer Nicholas Des Jardins for $25 million. “All the items included in this shooting were provided by third parties that confirmed in writing that these props were fake office documents. They turned out to be real legal papers most likely coming from the filming of a television drama,” Balenciaga says. “The inclusion of these unapproved documents was the result of reckless negligence for which Balenciaga has filed a complaint. We take full accountability for our lack of oversight and control of the documents in the background, and we could have done things differently.”
A spokeswoman for North Six says it hired Des Jardins and logistically managed the shoot permitting, booking of locations, equipment, catering, and crew management but had no creative control or input and wasn’t involved in post-production nor on set during the final arrangements. Des Jardins’ agent told the Washington Post that her client, who rented items from a prop house, is being used as a scapegoat. “Everyone from Balenciaga was on the shoot and was present on every shot and worked on the edit of every image in post-production,” she said, noting that Des Jardins is hiring a legal team.
Essentially, Balenciaga, North Six and the photographers all point to each other as the ones who carry the blame. A lawsuit with discovery proceedings and a possible trial detailing who planned and signed off on the imagery will certainly serve to keep the controversy going.
The Business of Fashion announced at the beginning of the year that Balenciaga creative director Demna would be the recipient of their Global Voices award for 2022. But due to his involvement in the controversial campaign, the fashion authority revoked his honor. On Nov. 28, they released an official statement about the update on Twitter, stating in part that, “at BoF, we hold the safety of children in the highest regard. And like many, we have been seeking the truth about how children appeared with BDSM-inspired products in Balenciaga’s recent campaign images, which are wholly inconsistent with our values.”
The fashion house has announced ongoing “internal and external investigations” and “new controls” and said in part that it was reaching out to “organizations who specialize in child protection and aim at ending child abuse and exploitation.” The statement concluded: “We want to learn from our mistakes and identify ways we can contribute.”
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