The Balenciaga Scandal

Last November, Balenciaga was under a huge amount of backlash due to a horribly produced ad campaign. The production house and the apparel designer Demna, featured a girl holding a teddy bear in bondage (The BDSM accessories were also on the runway at Balenciaga’s show at Paris Fashion Week). Later posts featured a bag from the fashion house’s collaboration with Adidas which was photographed atop copies of what appear to be documents from the Supreme Court case United States v. Williams, a ruling that upheld the PROTECT Act, which increased federal protections against child pornography. 

Demna features multiple imageries of child abuse through out the ad campaign, with doodles on the wall, presumably made by children, featuring images of horned beasts which has been as inferred as satan or the image of the abuser in the child’s mind and panda eyes. For the unversed, 'panda eyes' is a common p*dophile slang term used for child sodomy. As per Urban Dictionary, children can sustain black circles around their eyes due to the trauma caused after an inappropriate act. That, supposedly, looks similar to the eyes of a panda.

Twitter and news networks were quick to jump on this with the hashtag #cancelBalenciaga trending. Balenciaga would delete all their instagram posts to not get hate raided and after the elon musk takeover have decided to leave Twitter entirely, which was perceived by most as running away from the problem.

In February, Balenciaga’s creative director, Demna, broke his silence on the photoshoots. The designer addressed both the Spring 2023 and Gift Shop campaigns, discussing the shortcomings that lead to such weighty missteps and apologizing to those hurt by the fashion house’s actions, in an interview with Vogue. Balenciaga and the Kering Foundation also announced that it would partner with National Children’s Alliance (NCA) for the next three years.