Balenciaga and the Bondage of Culture

There is a myth that companies are pure capitalist enterprises guided only by profit. It’s trickier than this. My experience has been that while profit is the engine that powers large corporations, culture is what steers the vessel. 

This brings us to the bellwether case on this front, the luxury brand Balenciaga, which recently apologized for running advertisements of bondage-adjacent photos of children. The company’s responses included a stew of apologies and blame, including an aborted lawsuit against the ad agency that cooked up the campaign. 

I have no involvement with the case but have worked on analogous ones where a company’s communications caused trouble. None dealt with children and bondage. The reality is that a concept like this would have never been executed if there hadn’t been some sense that it would be accepted within the company’s corporate culture — even if it had ultimately been rejected. The only other possibility would have been a mendacious prank on the part of a disgruntled employee or vendor, which no one has suggested it was. Needless to say, the Balenciaga ad is not one that an agent of Procter & Gamble would have created. 

The culture of a company is relevant to the development of advertisements. There are things that a liquor commercial can convey that a baby shampoo company can’t or wouldn’t. When, say, an athlete is embroiled in scandal, Anderson Consulting may drop that athlete while Nike will retain him. Nike is a “street cred” outfit. Rebel boys and girls who break the rules. For them, the naughty has what social scientists call “narrative fidelity,” that which is faithful to what we expect from them. Put differently; outrageousness is not shocking to the target audience. 

Balenciaga’s creative director, Demna, apologized for the campaign, which was to be expected. Today’s corporate apologies are little more than salutations and perfunctory gestures (e.g., “nice to meet you”) to move things along. The bondage campaign was not the cause for Demna’s termination because a brilliant art director and/or ad agency calculated that their employer/client would, at the very least, consider it. 

Anything that purports to “push the envelope” immediately signals to cultural elites that this is something to be defended. It is what political operatives call “working the refs” — communicating to decision-makers that this is an issue they want to support by invoking a concept that is a key tenet of their belief system. 

Balenciaga’s decision to keep Demna is a wink. That wink says, “pump the breaks a little.” The message was not “no way, never.” It was “give it time.” The company does not want to lose its base, its edge. No, this doesn’t mean that the company supports child bondage; it means they don’t want their base to believe they’ve gone off-brand by surrendering to the prudes any more than Donald Trump wants to lose his by backing off of anything he says or does. 

The Balenciaga controversy spiked when Kim Kardashian criticized the campaign — and good for her for doing so. Nevertheless, at this writing, she has not walked away from the company. Furthermore, the controversy is receding despite the obligatory criticism about how the company botched its response (all crises are deemed botched by the digital commentariat). Botched? Not so fast. 

Balenciaga has made its decision considering its target audience, many likely adherents to the Doctrine of Relentless Envelope-pushing. They are betting that their audience will be fine with how the situation will shake out — the performative apology wrapped inside the Trojan Horse of cutting-edginess. They know their target audience better than I do. Nevertheless, crisis managers are learning that there is a gap that separates how people believe they’re supposed to feel about something and how they really feel about it. Balenciaga has made its calculation, which is…no biggie. Kim K said her piece and retreated, which is likely all that matters.