Balenciaga’s Demna Talks and Apologizes For Prop Controversy
After the uproar caused by Balenciaga‘s recent campaign, The brand’s very own has sat down and addressed the backlash.
Demna Gvasalia, the current creative director of the brand, had an interview with Vogue and broke down the whole situation.
The Campaign Which Caused It All
Image Credit: Balenciaga
In November 2022, the campaign was launched. As soon as this photo was posted, the internet was outraged. The campaign photo shows a child posing with a BDSM teddy bear.
The brand was quick to take down the picture and wrote out a statement on the situation which was posted on Instagram.
Via Instagram @balenciaga
This statement did not soften the blow, if anything it made matters worse. The internet did not accept this statement and has since called out reality star, Kim Kardashian for continuing to work with the brand.
This statement has since been deleted from the account.
Explanations And Apologises
Gvasalia sat down with Vogue for an interview where he discussed the controversy and apologized.
Demna was asked to explain his vision for this campaign.
“The image team proposed the photographer for this campaign because earlier in the year they presented his work to me and I liked the composition of his pictures, and he was added to the folder of potential talents to work with one day. Because the photographer’s work often included a multitude of toys placed around a room with kids in the middle of it, we thought we would be able to include the variety of products and items of the gift shop assortment into each picture, because, you know, we can’t make 100 images for all of these different products we need to show,” He says.
Image Credit: Getty Images
“This is where my error comes in. That was my big mistake.” He starts,
“I didn’t realize how inappropriate it would be to put these objects [in the image] and still have the kid in the middle. It unfortunately was the wrong idea and a bad decision from me. We should not have featured kids in images that included objects that were not related and inappropriate to them. No one, myself included, raised a question of it being inappropriate. There were control processes in place, people involved—internal and external—but we just did not spot what was problematic. This was an error of judgment. I regret this a lot. We learned from this now and there are going to be closer and more attentive checks and validation steps applied before any image goes out. For this I want to say I am sorry; I sincerely apologize for what happened and to anyone who has been hurt by it.”