Mexico City.- Demna, Balenciaga’s creative designer, spoke about the brand’s most recent controversial campaigns and assures that these incidents served to make a restructuring within the brand.
Last year Balenciaga launched two campaigns that received harsh criticism, the Christmas Gift Shop campaign and the campaign for the spring 2023 collection.
The first was questioned for portraying children on a stage surrounded by the items that the brand wanted to promote, ranging from wine glasses to bags with stuffed animals wearing harnesses and other inappropriate items to show to minors as they may allude to certain practices. sexual.
The second campaign was controversial for showing pages of a sentence confirming that the promotion of child pornography was not protected by the right to freedom of expression, a book by the artist Michaël Borremans with paintings showing children playing “in a perverse”, and a false diploma addressed to a man accused of pedophilia.
Demna explained how both campaigns developed and where Balenciaga’s failure was to allow them to come to light when they alluded to such a violent subject.
According to the designer, the campaign for the spring 2023 collection was intended to take place in a typical New York office environment, so he was in charge of approving the objects used, the poses of the models and the settings, however , calls the appearance of the previously mentioned documents in the shots an unfortunate coincidence.
Demna declared that he and his team were surprised by the complaint in networks on the subject that unites the controversial objects, since they were not used intentionally and it is not even clear who was responsible for mounting them in the photographic setting.
“I know that my work has been accused of being provocative, but a situation like this could never be part of my, let’s say, provocative nature. That was the most difficult thing for me personally: how did I not realize it? Because now I see very clearly that that It was badly done,” he said.
He argues that no one on the team involved in approving the photos saw the problem with the issue in question, so the brand has restructured the image department and established new verification and validation rules, so that an image goes through multiple channels, internal and external, to be reviewed and approved.
In addition, Balenciaga took advantage of his unfortunate mistakes to learn from them and has decided to help eradicate violence against children by joining a non-profit organization called the National Children’s Alliance.
The errors in both campaigns have served as an experience to pay more attention to the products and campaigns carried out by Balenciaga as a brand and individually by Demna, who assures that he will return to his beginnings as a clothing manufacturer and put aside provocative inspirations in his concepts. .
