Did Balenciaga Troll the Conspiratorial Right?
As long as I’ve been alive, American conservatives have been hunting for the elusive cabal abusing America’s kids. Last month, they finally found their smoking gun. Or did they?
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for fashion’s avant-garde. In late November, Parisian fashion house Balenciaga provoked outrage when they released an ad campaign for their Spring/Summer 2023 collection. The images, which were set in children’s bedrooms and featured child models posing with bondage-clad teddy bears, appeared to confirm the conspiratorial right’s worst suspicions about the bourgeois elites and their sinister designs upon America’s children.
Most tellingly, one product shot portrayed a handbag from a forthcoming collaboration with Adidas resting on a desk scattered with paperwork. Atop the pile, barely legible, was a document referencing a 2008 Supreme Court judgement upholding prohibitions against the “pandering of child pornography”. This, the cabal hunters declared, was the smoking gun, and pandemonium ensued.
With the controversy now dominating right-wing cable news channels, and even on-again, off-again, ever-closer, not quite fashion mogul Kanye ‘Ye’ West denouncing the label, Balenciaga quickly scrubbed the campaign from all of their social media channels and issued a lengthy apology. Too little, too late. It was all finally out in the open.
Or maybe not.
As long as I’ve been alive, American conservatives have been hunting for the elusive cabal of elite paedophiles abusing America’s kids. In the ‘80s, they were believed to be in America’s preschools, where suspiciously unmarried (or, when female, insufficiently domesticated) care workers were molesting children in abusive rituals.
Ultimately, that theory languished against a number of insurmountable hurdles, most notably an inability to ever locate the basements where these ceremonies were supposedly taking place, and suspicions that many of the children’s testimonies had been coached by the paranoid adults surrounding them. Gradually, the conspiracists abated.
In the mid-‘00s, the hysteria returned in response to the LGBTQ struggle for marriage equality that shaped the latter half of the Bush administration. The fundamentals were unchanged, but the target shifted explicitly to gay and lesbian people, who were now grooming kids in order to turn them queer, reproduce their ranks, and slowly take over society, destroying the nuclear family in the process.
Since then, these two strands have melded with more general conspiracies of the InfoWars variety into a shifting, malleable folk tale, one about powerful elites preying on the young for their vital essence, and who are controlling (or under the control of) a roster of Others infiltrating politics and sculpting the cultural landscape to their image. Most prominent was the Pizzagate debacle of the 2016 election (with the return of those elusive basements), which eventually morphed into the all-encompassing QAnon meta-conspiracy that consumes American conservatism today.
Now the idea that satanic groomers are targeting America’s children has become a multi-season storyline for the right. Conveniently, the culprits tend to align with whomever right-wing cable news channels have selected as that electoral cycle’s scapegoat: the Clintons; immigrants and those who traffic them (who may or may not be one and the same); and, most recently, schoolteachers and transgender people, particularly trans women. But despite their persistence and the narrative’s discursive sticking power, the groomer hunt itself has mostly been a dud.
Until now.
Before going any further, let’s be clear: Irrespective of whether it truly betrayed the existence of a child-sacrificing cabal, the decision by a luxury fashion house to depict toddlers in scenes with bondage gear was stupid, tone-deaf and in unquestionably poor taste. That being said, this is hardly the first time the notoriously disconnected and aloof world of high fashion has caught flack for being careless with cultural signifiers. European houses getting (rightly) ripped to shreds for making culturally insensitive and even outright racist products and campaigns is an occurrence almost as regular as the seasonal collections themselves.
As the old adage goes, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. Suffice it to say that many of the people who populate the fashion industry aren’t malicious. But they do place a high premium on ‘edge’. And here’s the thing. Balenciaga’s Creative Director Demna Gvasalia isn’t simply edgy, he’s also kind of a troll. Ever since erupting onto the scene in 2016, the Georgian fashion designer has made a signature of winding people up with lip-curling stunts, infuriating fashion meta-commentary, and deliberately tacky (but reassuringly overpriced) products.
It started when his own label, Vetements (French for ‘clothes’), released a yellow t-shirt adorned with the logo of German postal company DHL which retailed for $250 and, vexingly, became that year’s must-have garment. Subsequent output has included a ‘no-show’ fashion show in a Paris multi-level car park featuring posters on walls in the place of models; an $885 sweatshirt adorned with promotional graphics from the movie Titanic; a $400 t-shirt sporting the logo of an infamous Berlin gay bar; a four-figure, ridiculously-proportioned military flight jacket manufactured by the same company that produces the $160 original (because, by Gvasalia’s own admission, theirs are made better anyway); a lookbook shot in the global capital, not of fashion, but finance, Zurich, which the label had recently made its home; and an $850 pair of embellished platform Crocs (sold out before they even hit the shelves).
None of this tomfoolery is helped by the fact that both Gvasalia and Lotta Volkova – varyingly his stylist, model, muse, and co-conspirator – both possess a painfully bone-dry sense of humour that holds that the best jokes should be told without ever cracking a smile. Laugh with them or at them, scoff, snarl, or yell. Whatever you do, you’ll be lucky for a sign that any of it even registers. “But isn’t this all just one big jo—” Shhh. Don’t say that. Fashion is serious business.
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Put another way, Gvasalia and Volkova both appear to be adept at, or to very much enjoy, getting a rise out of folks – particularly folks who might never pay attention to fashion other than to roll their eyes and nudge the person next to them. And considering Volkova is just 32 years old (and Demna only nine years her senior), it’s probable that they’re both as plugged into the interminably pervasive and terminally online discourse of American politics and all its attendant ‘culture wars’ as the rest of us.
So, one might see how fashion’s enfants terrible would struggle to resist doing something to push the buttons of the notoriously twitchy American right, particularly at a time when they’re more keyed up than ever about identifying an enemy. Oft-quixotic hunts for secret groups directing the American scene (whether from above or below) have been a mainstay of American politics going back centuries, from Salem, to nineteenth-century paranoias about a covert Catholic insurgency, to the McCarthy hearings of the Red Scare era, Watergate, all the other -gates, and on, and on.
What is different today is how mass media and the Internet have turned this into an open-source, collaborative project that invites anyone and everyone to become online sleuths, scouring the trash heap for any piece of cultural ephemera that might be construed as evidence of the plot. This is a central component of QAnon’s appeal; how its decentralised, open-to-interpretation nature allows it to function as a meta-conspiracy in which any and all other suspicions can be incorporated. What started as the top-down dissemination of coded messages from an anonymous Washington insider has morphed into a chase that never needs to end, as new interpretations, possible clues, and revised theories can be endlessly inserted.
As a result, America’s conspiratorial right-wing have become ever more like Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, more in love with the chase and the sense of purpose it imbues than the prospect of ever actually catching the culprit. Gvasalia and Volkova may have seen this phenomenon for what it is and decided to play the Teddy to the right’s Leonard – throw them some bait, and follow along to see what happens. And what happened was inevitable and obvious: They bit, because when it comes to getting outraged about culture, they fundamentally cannot help themselves.
There is another dimension. Much of Gvasalia and Volkova’s work can be read as a commentary on consumerism, celebrity culture and spectacle – product, persona, and performance. In the social media age, the lines distinguishing these categories have become blurred, folding endlessly into one another. We live in a cultural tesseract in which a person’s image becomes a brand, dance moves are marked as intellectual property, and consumption becomes just as much about the surrounding ‘experience’ of consuming as the product itself.
This was the genius of Balenciaga’s Spring/Summer 2018 campaign which portrayed its models as celebrities trying to escape paparazzi, shifting the viewer’s focus from the handbag the advertisement is selling to the identity of the person it conceals. Or consider their Fall/Winter 2018 collection, which featured a collaboration with the UN’s World Food Programme. Was it a sincere gesture, or was a label in one of the most notoriously wasteful industries on the planet promoting this type of cause a subtle send-up of bourgeois, liberal hypocrisy? Maybe for everyone in the C-Suite at Kering, the multi-billion dollar multinational conglomerate that owns Balenciaga, it was the former. But one can’t help but wonder if Gvasalia’s intentions were otherwise. Perhaps that disconnect is part of the point.
Everyone now knows the sequence of events that follow when a brand or celebrity (one and the same) becomes embroiled in controversy. Removal of the offending content, a brief silence as they hastily hash together an appropriate course of action, followed by a Notes app apology – a gesture that is now so rote as to have become a meme.
Balenciaga’s response to this latest outrage followed that script to the letter, though they did add the nice touch of presenting their apology in white text against a black background in the same nouveau-corporate, sans-serif typeface as the brand’s logo. They assured their audience that they “strongly condemn abuse of children in any form,” and that they “stand for children safety and their well-being.”
In fairness, the announcement that they would be pursuing legal action against other parties involved, plus the perhaps-panicked typos, are the clearest signs that they really hadn’t anticipated the shitstorm they were walking into with this latest stunt, that this truly was a catastrophic fuck-up due to typical high-fashion detachment and cultural obliviousness – that the folks at Balenciaga aren’t malicious. The longer this drags on, the more it seems this saga has been nothing but disastrous for them.
And yet, for anyone who knows anything about the modern American right and their predilection for tying anyone or thing they perceive as liberal to child abuse, it was all so predictable. Maybe the higher-ups, far removed from creative, really were blissfully unaware of what they were walking into. Maybe the creatives were fucking clueless too. But you can’t look at a designer whose entire career has revolved around pulling one over on anyone wealthy, naive or trend-hungry to indulge him and not wonder.
Contemporary fashion is as much about conversation as clothes. Luxury goods might only be accessible to a slither of the population, but you still need everyone else kicking up a fuss to reassure the customer that your product’s head-turning potential is worth every penny. The question of who you get talking, and how, is always open for experimentation.
Until now, it’s unlikely conservatives would have given a shit about Balenciaga, a label beloved by fashionistas, influencers and Hollywood it-kids. Few brands better encapsulate the image of coastal elites and snooty woke liberals who oppose the right in their perceived contemporary kulturkampf. But now, that brand’s name is flying off the lips of every cable news commentator, YouTube grifter, and red-blooded conservative from Fargo to Fort Worth. Fashion loves edge. Balenciaga got it – even if it was more than they were looking for.
For decades, American conservatives have been on the hunt for the liberal sickos and twisted elites who they’re convinced are secretly pulling all the strings. In this instance, they finally caught a scandal that appeared to confirm all of their deepest suspicions, and they seized it with both hands. And in the process, they may have unwittingly become the puppets of another predictable viral marketing campaign.
Sometimes when you’re confronted by a tacky, tasteless publicity stunt, the best response is to note it, condemn it, and move on to more important matters. This is precisely what liberals had done with Alex Jones until attention-starved talking heads like Piers Morgan decided to amplify him to benefit their own ratings. But this is one of the conspiratorial right’s perennial maladies. They just can’t help themselves.
Fixate too hard on breadcrumbs, and you might end up missing the hook.
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Easily the most convincing and thorough explanation of this debacle I've seen. Great read.