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.

The Guardian has also got a separate article with Balenciaga apologising, again, a mentioning a lawsuit.

www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/nov/29/balenciaga-apologises-for-ads-featuring-bondage-bears-and-child-abuse-papers

Also a piece about this guy, who I'm sure was mentioned upthread

www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/feb/06/i-dont-think-elegance-is-relevant-vetements-demna-gvasalia-the-worlds-hottest-designer

Authenticity, couldn't be more fake.

IDK, Nils, there's publicity and there's the Ratner effect.

I didn't really know the brand beforehand, but they look sleazy as fuck and pretty revolting to me at the moment.

Sam Smith (nonbinary male) and Kim Petras (trans-identifying male) latest number one single Unholy has the lyric "Give me love, give me Fendi, my Balenciaga daddy"... Utterly disgusting. They haven't mentioned anything publicly about this even though other singers mentioning the brand have changed their lyrics. The video is full of BDSM references and the song is all about a man going to some kind of orgy with prostitutes leaving his wife at home with the kids - utter misogyny.

I just can't get over how Oli London has become the voice of truth and sanity on this! What happened...?

But from the other wing of the left, here's commentator/comedian Jimmy Dore, who formerly was involved with the Young Turks, struggling to find anything funny to say about it.

Dore did a second segment on it this week, this time dissecting apologetics about it from some US TV chat show ("The View").

They had a load of "the main problem was that Balienciaga played into totally unfounded and ridiculous right-wing tropes about grooming/sexualising children". Sigh.

rumble.com/v1y7ybk-the-view-hits-a-new-low-discussing-balenciaga.html

Interestingly, he didn't post that clip from the stream to his YouTube channel, so I had to get the clip from Rumble. Maybe concerned about too much discussion of "grooming" for YouTube censors?

That is genuinely chilling. They're discussing child abuse, calling it 'distasteful', repeatedly, then seguing effortlessly into laughing about how ugly the handbags are.

What the FUCK is going on in these people's heads?

Kathleen Stock's just published a piece in Unherd:

Why is fashion selling children? - Balenciaga mirrors our culture of exploitation

Lots of great bits:

As Louise Perry has argued, fears about paedophilia are often viewed by liberals as classically low-status, and associated by them with the “ignorant and credulous working classes”. And so, ironically sneering about low-status cultural fears about paedophiles, in a way only detectable to a few knowing onlookers, is automatically high-status.

...

It is bad enough to represent grown adults as slack-jawed, vacant children, but a lot worse to turn children into slack-jawed, vacant little adults.

...

Moral panics get off the ground partly because they pick up on unconscious forces genuinely rippling through a culture. It doesn’t seem to me a coincidence that there’s increasing prurient interest in paedophilia and grooming at the moment, when at the same time there have never been so many culturally acceptable ways to objectify your own child.

'Why is fashion selling children?'

It's the 'queering' of cultural norms.

I love Marina's writing, her sarcasm is like a stiletto blade. I think this is my favourite part.

It says only good things about our not-at-all-backwards culture that we’re forever waiting for the verdict of brands on everything from racist celebrities to rogue states, so we can gasp that the ultimate moral reckoning has been handed down: the sponsors or the advertisers or the retailers have left them.

This does raise some issues, though. Part of the function of art (high fashion is at least in some ways also art) is precisely to question, reflect, and disrupt.

Where do we draw lines between reflecting culture's sickness back at itself to draw attention to it and actively promoting that sickness?

'nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes' - yes, but there is also room for the idea that artists/designers are making comment on social issues. I'm not saying this is what Balenciaga is/was doing, at all, just that the wider issue also matters.

Lolita is a good case in point - some feminists argue it's nothing more than propaganda for paedophiles, some argue that it exposes the banality of CSA and seductiveness of abusers.

Lolita is a good case in point - some feminists argue it's nothing more than propaganda for paedophiles, some argue that it exposes the banality of CSA and seductiveness of abusers.

JKR is a fan (something else for the haters, I suppose):

In a 2000 interview with BBC Radio 4, Rowling revealed a deep love of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial book Lolita, saying, "There just isn't enough time to discuss how a plot that could have been the most worthless pornography becomes, in Nabokov's hands, a great and tragic love story, and I could exhaust my reservoir of superlatives trying to describe the quality of the writing."
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_influences_and_analogues#Other_favourites

This piece in Vogue is disgusting: www.vogue.com/article/has-the-balenciaga-controversy-gone-too-far

"But for me, the juxtaposition is just a very unimaginative way to be controversial. I am more bored than offended, but I do understand how for others it could seem distasteful."

Let us watch the fashion industry protect its own. The truth we see what they are all doing. And why.

Thanks for all the links on this thread. I have gone down a rabbit hole on Kubrick, bear symbolism and all the rest of it these odd and disturbing things these last few days. Somewhat chillingly, whilst reading this thread on my phone the other day, an ad popped up on for a children's clothing range (didn't catch which one before it flipped to another ad). One of the items of clothing, modelled by a small child, with his/her back turned to the camera, was a long red over the hips jumper, with a brown bear's face covering the bottom portion. This freaked me out as I'd just watched the recommended video about the Shining, and the brown bear that keeps appearing in that.

Following one of the links that talked about some Balenciaga leggings bearing spiral symbols, I found this 2016 DM article about symbols identified by the FBI that predators use, to look out for on children's items .

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3560069/The-symbols-pedophiles-use-signal-sordid-sexual-preferences-social-media.html

I had no idea, and am kind of glad to have not known about this when my children were very young. Those symbols look so innocent and innocuous.

I also was catching up this morning on a documentary I'd recorded, and a Prada perfume ad came up. In it, the model is running down a bluish triangular spiral staircase. It reminded me of one of the symbols referred to in the article. I am wondering if the fashion industry has just been plonking this stuff in ads for years to laugh at the unknowing public.

That Young Turks item was so faux naive. "Maybe I'm a prude" she says, for thinking a bondage bear is inappropriate. He is so disdainful of it all, it's so beneath him (a billion dollar industry that has a massive influence on culture, body image, commerce, use of developing countries' labour, all political issues is beneath him). Shifting blame on to women who buy the items and particularly blaming rich women, with no analysis of how these brands lead the public around by he nose, pretty much, on what current fashion is. And yes, while we can choose not to be drawn in to it, the idea that consumers have any real control over design/creative decisions is disingenuous.

Where do we draw lines between reflecting culture's sickness back at itself to draw attention to it and actively promoting that sickness?

Well, somewhere before the point you start actually involving real children, at least?

I'm sorry but Kathleen Stock's take has shocked and disappointed me. WTF:

"Though — of course — I don’t know the truth of what actually happened at Balenciaga, it seems to me that the “deliberately paedophilic” interpretation is probably wrong. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing was an accident. As others have suggested, rather than acting as a direct manifestation of a paedophile conspiracy, it seems more likely that the campaigns were offering knowing nods to the aesthetics of paedophile conspiracies. Viewed in this light, the problem is not so much the imagery but that the proles on the internet hadn’t done a Masters in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths."

AND

"Generally speaking, the fashion industry is littered with pictures of young women with a sexualised, exploited, fetishised, or downright quasi-paedophilic vibe. And female consumers apparently lap it up — perhaps because they tell themselves, accurately, that promoting abusive sex is not the direct point. As with everything else in the fashion world, nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes."

I don't know.. I think a serious-faced young child photographed face down, with empty wine glasses, and a teddy bear dressed in bdsm wear by her bottom is pretty positively asserted. Jesus Christ.

AND

"For me, an under-explored aspect of the Balenciaga scandal is the apparent fact that parents somewhere have let their very young children be photographed in these campaigns."

Not the child pornography referencing legal documents then Kath? This is not naivety. F**k all these people.

there's that 'distasteful' again.

Oh for sure.

I'm really sorry, but while I enjoy a theoretical debate on controversial topics as much as the next person, sometimes the truth is just there in front of you, and no amount of intellectual obfuscating is going to disguise that.

I think the fact that while both Kanye is being shouted out for his anti-Semitism and Lady Susan Hussey is being crucified for her racism right now in the news, the chattering classes debate intellectually about what are clearly suggestively paedophilic images of children published for a huge fashion brand tells you everything you need to know about how much society cares for and protects its children.

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11272661/Kanye-West-sports-mystery-marks-face-Balenciaga-mouth-guard-Givenchy-PFW.html

All a bit odd, if you ask me.

Just remembered something. Kanye West's seminal album, The College Drop Out: the sleeve image is of a man dressed as a red bear.

He's also just done a weird interview on InfoWars with a balaclava over his face - no eye or mouth holes, just completely covered (a bit like his ex's head and face covering dress for Balenciaga). And he's spouting the most disgusting things in praise of Hitler and holocaust denial. Alex Jones, of all people, is having to correct him on this!

He's a very disturbed person IMO. And if it's not a mental health issue, he's just plain wicked.

Absolutely this. ^^

I don't get the sudden political interest in Kanye and why anyone is giving him more than a few minutes of any day. THAT'S odd if you ask me.

It's not sudden. KW has been seen as a politically active showbiz figure for years, his music containing politically charged lyrics, and he's often indicated that he wants to run for office. One notable incidence was during a telethon for Hurricane Katrina survivors in 2005, when he went on a diatribe about George Bush hating black people, while Mike Myers (Austin Powers) stood next to him looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights.

KW and KK courted Trump during his term in office. KK had a mother convicted of child murder pardoned by Trump. KW has been Trump's ally for a number of years now. He attended a dinner recently with Trump at Mar-a-lago, and brought along a notorious anti semite/white supermicist , Nick Fuentes - brought along apparently at the request of Milo Yianoppolous (Julie Bindel's former speaking circuit mate).

Milo is in charge of KW's 2024 presidential election campaign...!

Thanks for explaining. I'm up-to-date with the recent news about him. I know about the Trump affiliation and about KK helping a woman get out of prison and the somewhat-lost-for-a-while Milo being charge of his campaign (I don't understand what is motivating his attachment) The recent stuff I'm aware of.

However I wasn't aware he'd taken much of a socio-political stance beforehand, thus my ignorance and struggle to place the rising political attention he's gained in context. It makes more sense now I guess.

I'm still missing something though as to him being taken seriously there's nothing there that I see that says this is a credible person with a consistent message about anything. In every interview I've seen he says something off. Plus I find him having been married to a Kardashian a big minus to any idea of him having a particularly 'based' world view. So????

Could it be like Trump, when he started running for office having previously just been a very successful businessman and reality show star previously? But I feel I understood that.

Is it deeper than that? I guess I'm not the audience, but I like to understand if a particular segment of society starts gravitating towards something or someone. Usually I can relate at least a bit. But not in this case for some reason.