Balenciaga could suffer a major financial hit — and lasting damage to its coveted brand — after the pricey luxury label ran an ad campaign with children holding teddy bears wearing sexual bondage gear, industry experts told The Post.
The flap unfolded last week when the Spanish fashion brand apologized for the revolting campaign. It pulled the ads and later filed a lawsuit against the producers, blaming them for the inappropriate imagery.
But Balenciaga — owned by the French luxury giant Kering, which also owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta — will likely take a hit to its bottom line for its poor taste, even as it scrambles to reverse the damage with firings and finger-pointing, experts tell The Post.
“I don’t see how they defend themselves, quite honestly,” luxury marketing expert Pam Danziger told The Post. “I think this will have a very strong impact on the brand ultimately.”
Danziger added that she believes heads are likely to roll at the storied fashion brand, which was founded in 1919 in San Sebastian, Spain, by Cristobal Balenciaga.
“I believe someone will pay the price and I don’t think it will be the stylists or the photographers,” Danziger said. “This was an intended message.”
The Balenciaga creative director, Demna Gvasalia, is known for pushing the envelope. In October, he told Vogue, “Fashion should not please. The most important quality is the lack of fear because fear blocks creativity, and if you’re trying to please, you’re never going to make it. You should not please.”
Experts likewise question Balenciaga’s claim that it never approved the ads. Another recent ad for a purse depicted a messy desk with papers strewn everywhere, including a Supreme Court decision on child pornography, eagle-eyed social media investigators found.
“Even if by some remote chance, these ads weren’t sanctioned by people with authority at Balenciaga, that in itself speaks to a weak internal structure of checks and balances,” said Gary Wassner, chief executive of Hilldun Corp., a lender to the fashion industry.
By involving children, “They pushed provocation too far,” Wassner added. “Compromising children tends to offend everyone. And once the ads are out there, there’s no turning back.”
Balenciaga’s owner Kering will likely never disclose whether its sales were hurt, experts said. And it’s still too early to know the full extent of the public relations debacle.
But as with other fashion brands that crossed a line — including a backlash in China against Dolce & Gabbana’s 2018 ad depicting a model struggling to use chopsticks and speaking in an exaggerated Chinese accent — an apology will be insufficient, according to experts.
“When Dolce screwed up in China with inappropriate content, the impact was enormous financially,” Wassner said. “Their ad was insulting and discriminatory.”
Following the D&G ad, media influencers posted images of themselves destroying the brand’s products. Its Shanghai fashion show was canceled several days after the ads were released and its products were yanked from stores and e-commerce sites.
Dolce & Gabbana was forced to close some stores after the dustup, according to reports, and even though the company apologized for the ads and claimed that they were “unauthorized,” the privately owned Italian fashion house still had not recovered from the debacle as of last year, according to a CNN report.
On Sunday, Kim Kardashian, a longtime partner of the fashion house, also spoke out against the campaign.
“As for my future with Balenciaga, I am currently re-evaluating my relationship with the brand, basing it off their willingness to accept accountability for something that should have never happened to begin with — & the actions I am expecting to see them take to protect children,” she wrote on social media.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
