Very early days of course, but at this stage you’d probably judge that John Lewis’s Christmas ad campaign was going better than Balenciaga’s. This is a fast-developing festive cancellation shitstorm, so forgive me if I have missed any major staging posts across the past few days. But as of this morning, the luxury fashion house has: issued a mushrooming series of apologies for an ad series featuring children holding handbags crafted from teddy bears dressed in bondage outfits; deleted its entire Instagram history; had a confected industry award withheld from its resident creative genius; been exposed for an earlier ad campaign that featured casually placed … hang on, let me get my hazmat gloves … US supreme court documents relating to a case involving child abuse images; served a blame-shifting $25m lawsuit against the producer of that ad; held crisis talks with Kim Kardashian who has herself issued some archbishop of Canterbury-style statement about her shock and disgust about the BDSM cuddly toy ads; and become the lightning rod for a raging attack on liberal values, from anyone unfashionably accessorised with common sense to standard alt-right suspects, to the full QAnon wingnuts.
Honestly, you try to spread a little holiday cheer by getting some sad-looking children to hold up your bondage teddy bear handbags, and this is the thanks you get. Short of shooting the ad campaign in the basement of the pizzeria in which Hillary Clinton was conspiracy-theorised as masterminding a paedophile ring, it’s hard to see where Balenciaga could have been more extra, creatively speaking. I bet they wish they’d just done a big picture of Santa, sticking some of their gopping sock trainers under the tree of a bolshie Surrey injectables trainee, but the insistence that the market is something more edgily high-art than the reality is the fashion industry’s central creed.
Once again, we find ourselves in the position of wondering how people in fashion are the only ones yet to see Zoolander. I honestly can’t add to the auto-satirical fash-pack lunacy of the following actual statement from Balenciaga: “We strongly condemn child abuse; it was never our intent to include it in our narrative.” Please just take a moment to note how – even in the face of a full-spectrum paedo panic – Balenciaga cannot bring itself to relinquish some pretentious wank about “our narrative”. “It was never our intent to include child abuse in our narrative” is up there with “We accidentally folded corpse violation into our creative concept”.
The gang is now turning on itself, with Balenciaga blaming an outside company for the bad bits of the campaign, even though fashion house advertising is planned with more ruthless precision and granular attention to detail than some notable ongoing military invasions. The photographer would also like people to know he had nothing to do with it, declaring: “I was only and solely requested to lit the given scene and take the shots.” Please enjoy this post-fact version, where that famously laissez-faire breed – the fashion photographer – rocks up to a job, going: “Tell you what, luv, you stick the frock on and I’ll snap it. We’ll be done by Homes Under the Hammer.”
Other telling details? I’m confused to see so little mention of this huge fashion-and-beyond story on the Vogue website, where one can typically read about all manner of injustices – though, not, apparently, if they involve advertisers. Then again, keeping the advertisers happy is arguably fashion’s most tirelessly heroic labour. One of the funniest things about fashion shows is how vanishingly rarely anyone who attends them dislikes what they see. Season after season, the most pedestrian rot is lauded as “genius” or “art”. Stinking reviews of shows are so rare that I can count them on a single bejewelled claw.
Which brings us to Balenciaga’s own show last month. If you somehow missed this one, Forbes described it as a “messaging masterstroke”, while the label’s artistic director, Demna Gvasalia, compared his job to Jesus carrying the cross. Yet the show was toweringly absurd, featuring hag-styled women tramping miserably through a vast indoor peat bog. Models with stitched and bruised faces were sent down this slurry-walk, where they encountered various types of unpleasantness from piles of mud to Kanye West. As usual, pointing and laughing was not allowed, so it’s no surprise that the subsequent Christmas ad campaign was a skew on the emperor’s new clothes where the boy is made to hold a bondage-teddy handbag instead.
But perhaps the most unusual part of this scandal is that a brand has been judged the sinner – as opposed to the normal contemporary state of affairs, which is waiting for brands to sit in judgment on other sinners. 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. At the tamer end of affairs, this is why a load of brands felt society simply demanded them to make lavishly ridiculous statements on the death of the Queen. And at the other extreme is the habit of placing far greater emphasis on whether some British football pundit is working for a Qatari broadcaster than on the fact that we cheerfully sell the Qatari regime billions of pounds’ worth of weapons with barely a peep.
Perhaps one day we’ll read a statement like: “Iconic defence influencer the UK government says it will no long work with Saudi Arabia. ‘We partnered with them on one campaign – admittedly, it was a bombing campaign – but have no plans to collaborate again.’” Until then, and for all the justified furore, it’s worth remembering that the only thing more ridiculous than fashionpolitik is realpolitik.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
