Balenciaga in 2022: a value without a boundary

In November 2022 Balenciaga released its holiday “Gift Collection” campaign, in which young children posed with plush teddy-bear bags whose harness-style straps many viewers read as bondage gear. Days later, people examining a separate campaign for the Spring 2023 Garde-Robe line noticed that the papers scattered on a desk in one shot included a printout of the 2008 US Supreme Court decision in United States v. Williams, a case about the law against pandering child sexual abuse material. The reaction was immediate and global, and it continued for weeks.

Balenciaga apologised for both campaigns and withdrew them. It also filed a lawsuit seeking 25 million dollars from the production company and the set designer of the second shoot, over the documents, then dropped it about a week later. On 2 December 2022 creative director Demna posted a personal apology on Instagram, saying it had been inappropriate to have children promote objects that had nothing to do with them, and chief executive Cédric Charbit said the company’s content validation process had failed, announcing an image board to review content and an external agency to assess it. Kering, the owner, later said Balenciaga’s fourth quarter of 2022 had been less positive partly because of the controversy, particularly in the United States. In March 2025 Demna left for Gucci, and in July 2025 Pierpaolo Piccioli, formerly of Valentino, took over as Balenciaga’s creative director.

Provocation as a primary value

Under Demna, Balenciaga had built much of its recent identity on transgression, with daring and often controversial designs and campaigns meant to unsettle. In our method that is a legitimate choice. A brand picks a few primary values to invest money, time and reputation in, and a house can decide that discomfort is one of them. It worked commercially for years, and it gave Balenciaga a clear place in a crowded luxury market.

The books add a condition that matters here. Values sit at the top of a governance ladder, and they limit the space of choice. A value tells a team what to pursue, and a mature value set also says what the brand will never do, through the class we call antithesis: the values the company deliberately rejects. Provocation is a value that pushes outward by definition. Without a written boundary, each campaign has to be a little sharper than the last, and nobody inside is responsible for saying where the edge is.

Where the public had already drawn the line

A value that has no declared boundary will eventually be tested at the one place where the public has already drawn its own. Children and sexualised imagery is about as clear a line as exists in public life, and it holds across countries, ages and political camps. Customers who had enjoyed the house’s jokes about luxury did not extend that tolerance here. The brand’s audience had accepted provocation aimed at fashion, money and taste, and it rejected any suggestion of harm to children.

This is why we read the case as a failure of governance more than of creativity. We do not know who chose what inside the shoots, and we make no judgement about the people involved. What is visible from outside is that no step in the approval chain was built to stop an image at that boundary, and the chief executive said as much when he described the validation process as having failed.

The decisions that followed

Trust takes the minimum: ten good campaigns and one public breach leave a wound. After the breach, the decisions mattered as much as the images. Suing the production company and the set designer moved attention onto suppliers at the moment the public wanted the brand to own the problem, and withdrawing the suit within a week confirmed that it had been the wrong move. The later steps went the other way: a personal apology from the creative director, a statement from the chief executive that named the failure, and a structural fix in the form of an image board. Those last decisions turned a value into a process with a boundary, which is what the value had lacked.

The change of creative director in 2025 opens a new chapter whose direction is still taking shape. For any brand that lives on an edgy value, the useful work is to write down the boundaries before a campaign finds them, and to give someone the authority to enforce them. That is part of what we do when we design a brand’s values, antitheses included.