French fashion company Balenciaga is perhaps not a household name in Ireland, but internationally the brand is one of the most hotly sought after by those eager to fit into the ranks of the street style brigade.
I hate Balenciaga: the grossly ugly shoes, the cheap looking oversized logos, the misshapen bags, to me most of their brand is the opposite of style or beauty, it seems to attempt to grab attention by being unsightly, and – as the prices show – people spend thousands on it.
Despite my disdain, according to CCP Luxury , Balenciaga “achieved a total of 17.645 billion euros in sales in 2021” alone, and the brand is closely associated with a host of celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Kanye West.
The company’s latest ad campaign intended for the ‘holiday’ season caused huge controversy after the brand decided to feature little girls holding teddy bears dressed in sexual bondage gear.
There has, thus far, been relatively little condemnation of the ad campaign featuring the sexual fetish teddy bear bags by the celebrity class, which is somewhat curious in itself.
been featured with children in this campaign. We have immediately removed the campaign from all platforms.”
I’ve never worked in advertising, but being involved with media production the concept and images would have to have gone through multiple layers of scrutiny to end up being published, the fact that this was allowed to happen is deeply disturbing.
We often hear our ‘woke’ self-appointed overlords preaching about tolerance and nuance. It seems that as a society we may be nuancing ourselves straight to the gates of hell.
Why on God’s green earth would anyone think having little girls posing with S&M bondage gear is in any way appropriate? Is this just a symptom of an era of pathological tolerance?
The story doesn’t end there: Balenciaga’s scheduled 2023 Spring ad campaign ‘accidentally’ featured props that just so happened to be copies of court documents from a US Supreme Court ruling ‘United States v. Williams’ 2008.
The ruling affirmed that digital promotion or pandering of images that could be construed as child pornography – where no sexual abuse occurred in order to produce the material – was outside the protection of freedom of speech.
The company claims that props for the shoot were provided by third party entities.
“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.” it said
Well riddle me that…..
This morning I came across an article by The American Consertive profiling Balenciaga’s chief designer, Lotta Volkova.
A photo of Lotta Volkova the head designer for Balenciaga and Adidas
Here she wearing a Cannabal Corpse shirt in church as a way to mock Christianity pic.twitter.com/2nsuPrWQYC
— Jake Shields (@jakeshieldsajj) November 28, 2022
Volkova’s instagram posts – her account is now set to private – paint a picture of someone with a remarkable interest in the macabre and sexualising children’s toys.
The Satanic Stylist responsible for styling at Balenciaga- Lotta Volkova- the same one who posts the most horrific and abhorent images of kids on Instagram is…you guessed it- followed by SKIMS- Kim Kardashians Brand
Skims only follows 214 people- only the closest people to Kim pic.twitter.com/eMj8Ep5w9N
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) November 28, 2022
Additional images posted to instagram by Volkova – some of which are rather disturbing in nature – can be viewed in The American Conservitave feature here.
Balenciaga says internal and external investigations into the content of their now infamous ad campaigns are ongoing and that they are “revising our organisation and collective ways of working”.
Given the nature of the content publicly posted by the brand’s top designer, this writer finds it extremely difficult to imagine that any of this was done by mistake.
It seems rather that the brand simply thought they could get away with it. Depravity is sometimes hidden in plain sight.