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Balenciaga 2020 Campaign
The newsreader is wearing an intense red uniform that immediatly demands attention, while its oversized shoulders meant to radiate feminine confidence. At the same time, her clothes appear overtly minimalistic and borderline featureless, stripped down to only that which is necessary. Her uncannily superimposed face appears to speak but you can’t hear her voice.
The screen in her back presents news stories concerning planets about to realign, a lake through which all water sinks away, the end of traffic jams, as well as the sudden “return of pedestrians”.
We are presented with footage of people styled in various forms of formal wear including suits and dresses, strolling on the streets with careless confidence, in an almost mechanized gait, calculated, as if programmed to follow a certain route leading to a predetermined destination. There is a presidential campaign ensuing, but its developments and eventual conclusions seem to carry little significance.
On February the 18th, Balenciaga released its summer 2020 campaign video that feels nothing short of bizarre (Benedict, 2020), portraying your usual news broadcast but deprived of all hope and human spontaneity. It appears to be satirizing political problems afflicting our world, illustrating a society that has persevered and moved on from countless unkept promises. Its citizens are perhaps still aware of society’s ongoing crises but know equally well that their contributions ceased to matter.
The video functions as a caricature of our current condition, where the muted voices and robotic posture of news host voices represent a disregard for global crises. Pedestrians adorned in the latest fashion emphasizing our material obsessions but walking robot-like as if personal freedom has waned. The video simultaneously criticizes itself and the industry it engages in, with Demna (Balenciaga’s creative director) undoubtedly fully conscious of its own brand’s contributions to our looming ecological crises. Public condemnation was perhaps expected as social media flooded the brand with comments surrounding hypocrisy. But despite the obvious bleak representation of a near-future society, the creative director remains rather hopeful with statements emphasizing “the cost of our well-being” and a return to “natural balance” (Blanks, 2019).