Balenciaga apologises for bondage bear advert involving child

That Guardian article is a joke. It's "let's hide it right at the end and hope no one notices it" but "look, we did report it". Bastards.

Nothing from the BBC yet.

@piedbeauty No.
They think we're really fucking stupid.

@PicturesOfDogs at this point I don't think the Guardian can even be bothered to pretend to take a dim view of paedophilia.

I fully expect them to be sympathising with the 'MAPs' rather openly in the not too distant future. Owen Jones will probably dress himself in their flag as an act of solidarity 🙄

Jesus bloody wept.

Oh come on. Someone at Balenciaga saw the pics, signed them off, thought they were fine. This is not a'mistake'. It was deliberate. Do they think we're all stupid??

So basically all this controversy, and the guardians take is they should promote the dirty looking trainers? 🤣
Wouldn’t expect anything less from them 🤦‍♀️

Well the Guardian has rather drawn their line in the sand havent they?
Rather than oppose the images it refers to them as little more than a footnote in some pseudo fashion article detailing a pair of trainers!

Would the trainer article have been run where Balenciaga not already in deep shit? Of course not.

The Guardian knows that the left leaning media will be vilified for their silence on the issue and so they decide to print something entirely disingenuous?

They must be under the impression that we are all really fucking stupid...

Article in the Guardian on Balenciaga, bit of a puff piece but a bit more critical at the end.

www.theguardian.com/business/2022/nov/25/645-pound-adidas-stan-smith-trainers-fly-off-the-shelves-at-balenciaga

You prompted me to check the vigilant citizen site and sure enough they have put out an article on this already.
Predictably it's full of the usual Monarch mind control bollocks but it contains some info regarding the photographer's past public tweets, which if true are quite disturbing and does appear to indicate that the campaign has the intention of attempting to normalise paedophilia.

@JackGrealishsLegs yes I have happened across the vigilant citizen site. IMHO a lot of it is reaching in the extreme, the author attributes almost everything in pop culture to monarch mind control.
Whilst it is true that intelligence agencies have used mind control for decades and project monarch was a real thing I fail to see the link between that and the music industry. I don't think for example that Katy Perry is a manipulated CIA puppet.

I suspect that the site is either a bona fide whack job or a government operation to discredit legitimate conspiracies by association.

picklemewalnuts you are right, the tape end ending on an A is the most plausible thing. And under all other circumstances one wouldn’t think twice about it. But considering that the whole picture (and all pictures in the series) appear to be carefully arranged, plus the other allusions… does raise questions, whether this was intentional, an inside joke, as you say.

This sort of stuff is so interesting (and shocking and scary of course). Has anyone else ever looked at the Vigilant Citizen website? I expect they will cover this in due course.

The (B)AAL on the tape...

Clearly elsewhere the tape says BALENCIAGA.

Just on that roll we have AAL.

now there's a couple of possibilities.

Most likely it's where the word BALENCIAGA ends and the tape ends, so there's an overlap.
That's more likely than them commissioning two sets of tape, one spelled correctly one not.

Still, the decision to let the tape sit there looking like an incorrect spelling was made. If it were me, I'd have put the end/overlap at the back so that wasn't seen.

Why didn't they, if it's not an in joke?

I want to agree with knitting.
However, there's an 'odd thing', over and above the oddity of the whole campaign, in so many pictures.

I can't believe it is coincidence that every shot has something. I can believe the commissioners didn't see it. There are a hell of a lot of details there. They certainly signed off the whole vibe. The details? Would they have looked at the name on the certificate? Would they have recognised it? Perhaps not.

I know what you mean but I don't know enough about the art world to be honest.

The rest I stand by though.

Re unauthorised you may be right. I’m not saying either way

Just that the idea that whatever is there is benign holds no water. They are denying it because it is bad. They may be responsible or not

I agree 100% about boiling the frog.

I don’t think anyone on this thread has claimed this is irrefutable proof of anything.

More questioning how and why these were out there.

I don’t believe the unauthorised placement bullshit either, as the theme crosses too many different times now. There would have been eyes on every single image, and multiple levels of sign off.

I was the one who first mentioned pizzagate on here, because the link to me is stark. It was one of the first things I thought of when I saw the ‘other stuff’ in the ads other than the bdsm bears with black eyes.
I believe there is a concerted effort to desensitise people to this, and I think this campaign was to gauge reaction.

@deepwatersolo

I agree with everything you have written in your previous post.
However, nobody really cares (yet).

No, I don't blame you.
There is no clear and irrefutable evidence that this necessitates a child abuse cult hiding in plain sight.

Just as a possibly helpful thought experiment though; think now about what would constitute an undeniable public provocation that would make you believe, however discomforted that would make you feel that something abusive was going on.
Now, whatever that may be, commit it to memory and whatever you do, do not discount such evidence should it ever present itself in the future. No matter what the contemporary narrative may be.

Fwiw I truly believe they are attempting to boil the frog here.

Leemoe I‘m not saying it is impossible Kubrick was killed because he knew too much (especially if he knew some hard facts, that needed being kept secret, something I can‘t know and may very well be so). I‘m just saying I can‘t say either way.

In contrast, in the Regine Louf/Dutroux case way over 20 witnesses died under strange circumstances. German public broadcasting made a documentary about it titled ‚20 dead witnesses‘. Now there, nobody will convince me that this was all a coincidence and no cover up involving secret services was involved. And yet, nothing ever came of it.

Just like, clearly, Epstein didn’t kill himself, Ghislaine Maxwell is convicted of having run a human trafficking ring with him and nobody shows the slightest interest in finding out WHO THE GIRLS WERE TRAFFICKED TO. Nobody cares. (And those who do and always did have the pics and shape politics with them.)

Tbh the mentions of pizzagate don’t mean anything to me, I seem to have bypassed all that so I can’t comment.

But aside from the intentional styling which is bad enough (personally I’d like a legal pov wrt criminality here) there are items that were not authorised on set.

So someone has done this for a reason. I can’t really use the words like cult but some intention is there - related to the theme of sexual abuse of children.I don’t know why but Balenciaga have acknowledged they were there when apparently they shouldn’t have been.

Of course I believe there are incredibly inappropriate things in those ads. I'm not doubting that for a second. I don't necessarily think this is a child abuse cult in plain sight.

@MarshaBradyo I agree with you.

I will be watching with intent to see if any actual legal case ensues.
My fear is that we will hear no more about this whole sequence of events, given the lacklustre reposonse by the media.

I've been thinking about why the online analysis makes me so twitchy. I think it's things like Pizzagate and Wayfair. I know that these weird and offensive adverts shouldn't happen. At the very least it's creative types with no moral compass. But this shows why conspiracy theories like qanon, PG and W are so dangerous. They take the focus away from real CA.

It will interesting to see what happens here. At the very least it should make other brands think about NOT using child abuse for shock value in their arty ads.

I doubt Balenciaga would mention suing re items in shoot if they were purely internet rumours and nothing to worry about.

Whether they are accountable is up for date though (probably)

@PicturesOfDogs

In a very cynical moment I may wonder if this campaign has been intentionally released in to the public sphere to gauge how successful pizzigate has been; both in desensitising the public to and in pushing them to automatically and reflexively dismiss any reference to large scale child abuse perpetrated by those with power as ridiculous conspiracy theories.

Because pizzagate was undoubtedly unfounded, however the origins of it what arouses my suspicions.

This is how they get away with all the disturbing shit.
People bending over backwards to deny what’s in front of their face.

We’ve already had, ‘I don’t believe the images are real’ pretty soon the whole thing will be dismissed as all together photoshopped.

Nothing in these shoots are by chance, if it makes people uncomfortable to point this out, then it makes people uncomfortable.
Oh well.

What it doesn’t do is remove the occult/bdsm themes in adverts that centre children