Balenciaga is no stranger to legal disputes and copyright infringement lawsuits, but, in the last few days, it ended up in the eye of a storm that turned into a blame game and ended up with a legal suit.
Last week Balenciaga unveiled a campaign for its Gift Collection featuring six children, including some holding BDSM style teddy bear bags from the fashion house's S/S 23 collection. The campaign was shot in Paris by Italian documentary photographer Gabriele Galimberti, better known for his work on the National Geographic.
Galimberti was called to shoot the campaign, but didn't chose the models and objects on display and didn't come up with the concept, even though the fashion company based the images on the artist's series "Toy Stories", showing children from all over the world surrounded by their toys. Balenciaga's team arranged indeed around the children a variety of products, including homeware, pet wear, perfumes and limited-edition collectibles and bespoke furniture.
When people complained on social media about the bondage bears paired with children, Balenciaga pulled the ads from all platforms and apologized on social media for any offense the holiday campaign may have caused.
Yet, controversy continued when somebody spotted in a separate S/S 23 campaign shot in a Manhattan skyscraper office setting, a Balenciaga/Adidas bag on some legal documents.
A blown-up image revealed that the documents referred to the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision, "United States v. Williams," which upheld a federal child pornography law known as the Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act of 2003 (PROTECT Act), finding it was not in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution (right to free speech or expression).
Now, while the campaigns were produced at different times of the year, they were released almost together and both showed a sort of pattern pointing at child pornography and sexual references.
Once again Balenciaga apologized on social media, stating in an Instagram Story: "We apologize for displaying unsettling documents in our campaign. We take this matter very seriously and are taking legal action against the parties responsible for creating the set and including unapproved items for our Spring 23 campaign photoshoot. We strongly condemn abuse of children in any form. We stand for children safety and well-being."
According to the explanation provided, the image shot by photographer Chris Maggio, was supposed to feature a fake document, but the documents turned out to be real legal papers probably from the filming of a television drama.
Last Friday, after a blame game that lasted for a few days, during which it was thought that the fashion house may have taken legal action against Maggio, Balenciaga eventually filed a $25 million lawsuit in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against the independent production company that created this photoshoot, North Six Inc., as well as set designer Nicholas Des Jardins and his eponymous brand (let's highlight that North Six logistically managed the campaign in the office setting, but it was not involved with the campaign featuring the questionable teddy bears).
The court papers (Download Balenciaga-sas-v-north-six-inc-notice-and-summons-11-25-2022) state that Balenciaga didn't know nor it had authorized the inclusion of the court decision. "As a result of Defendants' misconduct, members of the public, including the news media, have falsely and horrifically associated Balenciaga with the repulsive and deeply disturbing subject of the court decision. Defendants are liable to Balenciaga for all harm resulting from this false association," the court papers charge.
As confusion ensued over the two campaigns and the two stories were combined into one in some reports, Galimberti started receiving life threatening messages accusing him of being a pervert and a pedophile. On top of that, the photographer claimed he lost some assignments and jobs because of the online debates. For these reasons the phtographer announced he was thinking of taking a legal action against a few other major news outlets (more fuel was added to the fire when Kim Kardashion stated on social media that she was shaken by the disturbing images and announced she wanted to re-evaluating her relationship with the brand...).
Now, while in Galimberti's defence one could state that this was his first foray into fashion so he may not have been aware of the subtleties of the industry, he may have still questioned the concept and the final styling, especially considering that it was inspired by his own "Toy Stories" series (suprisingly there was no written agreement between the fashion house and Galimberti stating he agreed to get the concept behind his own series applied to a commercial image; so that while Galimberti may have not come up with the concept of the products, the display of the objects is directly inspired to his series).
Then again, the blame of it all shouldn't be on the photographers and the production companies/set designers as in these cases the client approves the final images of the advertising campaigns and surely these images went through different assessment levels at the fashion house. So you get the impression that teams at Balenciaga were trying to be subtly cool and radically provocative, but things horrifically backlashed.
So what does this story teach us? Well, first of all learn to take your responsibilities: Balenciaga's teams were at the shoots and must have edited and approved the images, and, while the fashion house apologized, maybe there should have been an internal investigation first to assess who approved what.
Then, if you are hired as a freelancer to work on an advertising campaign, always get as many information as possible about the concept, set and setting, to check if there are issues you don't feel comfortable with or if an image implies a double entendre. Last but not least, this story teaches us that it is useless to look for a job in fashion design when there are more jobs in fashion law as lawfare is definitely trending.
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