Balenciaga apologises for bondage bear advert involving child

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They're also taking legal action against its creator

What I want to know is who the hell signed it off and why were the parents happy to let it go ahead?

I've included the images for anyone who hasn't seen them.

I can’t comment on that Baal thing I don’t know enough.

But I do think Balenciaga are taking the inclusion of items on set seriously as they’ve mentioned suing over it.

No talk yet about the massive and years long collab between Kanye West and the brand. The same West who is a porn addict, who shows video of him having sex with his ex wife to excutives at board meetings, who dressed said wife in head to toe latex made by the brand, and on, and on, and on.

They have been pushing it for years.

Fashion really suffers from having almost exclusively male gay designers at the top. That results in the vereration of extreme thin, extreme youth, normalization of porn and so on. It has been a steady, increasing problem since my time in the early 90s. There is only a hand full of women left.

@deepwatersolo I think the only difference is that Kubrick wasn't (allegedly)whistleblowing from the perspective of a victim. (As far as I know and I'm in no way well read on this subject)

@Justasec321
If you remove the assumption of homosexual males instead of just males in general and widen your description to include the arts as a whole then I don't think you're far wrong.

My personal hypothesis about satanic rituals in the context of sexual abuse is that the scenario the victims describe will be so outlandish and bizarre that nobody will believe them. So you add some satanic/pagan symbols like BAAL and a dead chicken and whatnot to make sure that the victims of your otherwise banally sadistic abuse will never be believed.

As for the BAAL thing, I only saw it on the tape - …AAL.., actually. But considering that you otherwise read Balenciaga everywhere, it is the obvious deduction as it is all obviously carefully staged (which brings me back to Kubrick) - so why would anyone put a tape there with random words on it? But maybe there was such a tape just randomly lying around, and someone thought ‚ah, this yellow is nice‘ - what do I know.

What I do know is that carefully coded arrangements are not unheard of in the world of visual arts / cinematography.

You can find the images if you search. They haven’t been doctored.
Here’s a clearer one.

No ones comfortable with it, but I don’t see how people linking together themes from an advertising campaign ‘doesn’t help’
Those images were purposely put there. Why?
I think it needs to be seriously looked into, and that won’t happen if it’s allowed to slide under the radar.
How do you think it helps by you ignoring it, or dismissing it as photoshop, or whatever else you want to do/say to dismiss it, just because it makes you feel some discomfort.

This company looks like it is soaked and drenched in arty pomo vibes, atmosphere, ideology. These celebrate subversion, look to be 'edgy', to disrupt, to 'queer' and to undermine norms.

So many of the things noted are actually unremarkable in isolation - the artists whose books are on the desk are both well regarded and established, for example, their work doesn't cause that much of a stir. Look up the Chapman brothers Jake & Dinos for similar stuff - lots of art looks at dark, twisted, and unpleasant themes.

But this company seems to have focussed on and gathered all of these various artists, themes, symbols, provocations and edginesses and are using that as their brand. Hence the catwalk in a sea of mud, with bruised, scarred, pierced, bondage-wearing, mouth-breathing models.

Most of the time all of this 'darkness' in culture is a pose and relatively unproblematic, but it also encourages moral equivalence and and that means it's also a fertile ground of opportunities for anyone with darker motives.

Leemoe true, but they often left the (alleged) victims alive - because no one believed them, anyway. I‘d assume the same would hold for Kubrick.

I remember that Regine Louf documentary by the BBC. She didn’t sound like a lunatic and some of what she said could be independently confirmed (locations, houses with complex inner structures, timelines, other testimonies), yet particularly in Belgium she was branded a lunatic. And then she was left alone.

wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/kim-kardashian-custom-balenciaga-tape-outfit-details-1235125419/

Oh, sorry the tape reads AALE.

@deepwatersolo I don't think that I agree that Kubrick, as a whistle-blower who was skirting dangerously close to the edge and a person of renown could not have been killed.

I don't think anybody believes that Epstein commited suicide these days, do they?

Kubrick is (was) more akin to an Epstein type figure, albeit without direct involvement in abuse, than a victim.

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

@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.

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)

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

@deepwatersolo

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

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.

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

The rest I stand by though.

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.