Luxury fashion brand, Balenciaga, has come under fire after an advertisement campaign brought to light to company’s obsession with satanic rituals.
“Balenciaga could suffer a major financial hit — and lasting damage to its coveted brand — after the pricey luxury label ran an ad campaign with children holding teddy bears wearing sexual bondage gear, industry experts told The Post.
The flap unfolded last week when the Spanish fashion brand apologized for the revolting campaign. It pulled the ads and later filed a lawsuit against the producers, blaming them for the inappropriate imagery.
But Balenciaga — owned by the French luxury giant Kering, which also owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta — will likely take a hit to its bottom line for its poor taste, even as it scrambles to reverse the damage with firings and finger-pointing, experts tell The Post.
The luxury fashion house claims it did not approve the ads and is suing the producer.
One expert believes the public relations debacle will lead to firings at the luxury brand.
The Balenciaga creative director, Demna Gvasalia, is known for pushing the envelope. In October, he told Vogue, ‘Fashion should not please. The most important quality is the lack of fear because fear blocks creativity, and if you’re trying to please, you’re never going to make it. You should not please’.
Experts likewise question Balenciaga’s claim that it never approved the ads. Another recent ad for a purse depicted a messy desk with papers strewn everywhere, including a Supreme Court decision on child pornography, eagle-eyed social media investigators found.
‘Even if by some remote chance, these ads weren’t sanctioned by people with authority at Balenciaga, that in itself speaks to a weak internal structure of checks and balances’, said Gary Wassner, chief executive of Hilldun Corp., a lender to the fashion industry.
By involving children, ‘They pushed provocation too far’, Wassner added. ‘Compromising children tends to offend everyone. And once the ads are out there, there’s no turning back’.
Balenciaga’s owner Kering will likely never disclose whether its sales were hurt, experts said. And it’s still too early to know the full extent of the public relations debacle.
Balenciaga’s creative director is known for pushing the envelope.
But as with other fashion brands that crossed a line — including a backlash in China against Dolce & Gabbana’s 2018 ad depicting a model struggling to use chopsticks and speaking in an exaggerated Chinese accent — an apology will be insufficient, according to experts.
‘When Dolce screwed up in China with inappropriate content, the impact was enormous financially’, Wassner said.
‘Their ad was insulting and discriminatory’.
Following the D&G ad, media influencers posted images of themselves destroying the brand’s products. Its Shanghai fashion show was canceled several days after the ads were released and its products were yanked from stores and e-commerce sites.
Dolce & Gabbana was forced to close some stores after the dustup, according to reports, and even though the company apologized for the ads and claimed that they were ‘unauthorized’, the privately owned Italian fashion house still had not recovered from the debacle as of last year”. -Lisa Fickenscher, New York Post
Cristóbal Balenciaga was actually a debonaire Spaniard, a man with elegant designs, who was friends with General Francisco Franco.
The French eventually took it over, and today the house of Balenciaga is no more than a bastion of unartistic degenerates petaling overpriced and hideous clothing designed to take the nouveau riche for fools.
The unsettling ad campaign photographs for the spring/summer 2023 collection included court documents from a U.S. Supreme Court decision (United States v. Williams) about a law banning child pornography pandering.
Specifically, a photo of a handbag, a Balenciaga and Adidas collaboration, displayed the court file that was partially covered by the bag.
The paper reads:
UNITED STATES v. WILLIAMS
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the eleventh circuit
No. 06-694. Argued October 30, 2007-Decided May 19, 2008
After this Court found facially overbroad a federal statutory provision criminalizing the possession and distribution of material pandered as child pornography, regardless of whether it actually was that, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U. S. 234, Congress passed the pandering and solicitation provision at issue, 18 U. S. C. 52252A(a)(3)(B).
Respondent Williams pleaded guilty to this offense and others, but reserved the right to challenge his pandering conviction's constitutionality. The District Court rejected his challenge, but the Eleventh Circuit reversed, finding the statute both overbroad under the First Amendment and impermissibly vague under the Due Process Clause.