Balenciaga, Sad Dogs & Provocative Marketing

Earlier this month, Balenciaga was rightfully called out for its campaign featuring children holding BDSM teddy bears, and a $3,000 handbag positioned atop Supreme Court papers ruling on child pornography.

That this is even a sentence is absolutely. fucking. astounding.

Since the backlash, there’s been a whole lot of “how could this happen?” …both externally and internally.

What were meant to be “fake office documents,” Balenciaga claims, “turned out to be real legal papers most likely coming from the filming of a television drama.”

Ah — the classic mix up.

I mean, who would want to take complete responsibility here when there are plenty of vendors and teams to blame. In a statement, Balenciaga has since hired just another team to oversee and approve its creative outputs… as if they were unable to do so themselves. Nice.

Meanwhile, there’s been a $25M lawsuit against a production company… which was then… dropped by Balenciaga… a week later? Charade? Threat? A quiet signal of actual responsibility? We’ll never get the full story.

But it’s one we’ve seen plenty of times.

Controversy and marketing is not new.