Balenciaga Should Not Have Backed Down
When you give into the prude police, they just demand more.
This week, a pair of ad campaigns from fashion house Balenciaga attracted criticism from The New York Post and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, creating an online mobbing that branded the luxury clothes and accessory maker pedophilia-adjacent. The New York Times has a good rundown here, which puts Balenciaga’s edgy advertisements in context.
Heck, Balenciaga has tried so hard for extreme that that it’s wandered amusingly into Zoolander’s “derelict.”
More recently, the two campaigns that have set off a moral panic include one by an Italian photographer who posed children with Balenziaga’s stuffed animal purses dressed in bondage gear and another, totally separate campaign that explores obscenity laws and speech regulation by showing court decisions related to child pornography. It’s all too much for the bow-tie with a head attached to it that is Tucker Carlson.
Here are the ads with the kids (the others are just books and papers):
These ads are hilarious. They juxtapose innocence with stuff we think of as naughty, but since the kids don’t engage with the naughty objects as naughty objects, we’re put in the position of the psychiatric patient who sees sex in every Rorschach drawing and then accuses the doctor of being a pervert for showing us dirty pictures.
Had thee photos been displayed in an art gallery, rather than online where they could scandalize the easily provoked, there’d have been no controversy. But the mob spoke, and loudly. Like so many companies before it, Balenciaga responded contritely, throwing its creatives overboard (and even suing the agency of the very tame “papers” campaign.)
The Middlebrow doesn’t believe anyone should issue apologies for victimless acts. Sponsoring advertising campaigns that turn some heads and maybe make people question ideas that are unquestionable, is nothing to regret. When it comes to the kids and the bondage bear bags, well, it was nothing but a gag. If you found it funny, great. If didn’t, move on. If it offends you, get help. The models weren’t exploited or sexualized. It was a simple juxtaposition of opposites, meant to break through our inattention to the everyday world.
As for the child pornography papers campaign — it points our attention to one of the agreed upon limits to free speech in a free society. Those bright lines are something we need to at least think about, in an era where corporate censorship is a bigger issue than government censorship (at least in the U.S., your mileage certainly varies elsewhere).
And what does Balenciaga get for its apologies, anyway? Certainly not absolution. It’s taken more as an admission of guilt. Balenciaga should have told its critics to grow But, I’m sure if I said that in a crisis communications meeting I’d be told, quite rightly, that ad campaigns that so offend that they need to be explained are failed campaigns and that the real mission here is to sell high-priced tightly-bound bear bags, not to raise consciousness or inspire social debate. And, that would be right, so far as the income ledger goes.
Which is why we can’t leave so much of what’s acceptable speech in the hands of private enterprise. They can’t even stand up for themselves, much less for the rest of us.