“We strongly condemn child abuse; it was never our intent to include it in our narrative.” Please just take a moment to note how – even in the face of a full-spectrum paedo panic – Balenciaga cannot bring itself to relinquish some pretentious wank about “our narrative”. “It was never our intent to include child abuse in our narrative” is up there with “We accidentally folded corpse violation into our creative concept”.

Marina Hyde

Honestly, you try to spread a little holiday cheer by getting some sad-looking children to hold up your bondage teddy bear handbags, and this is the thanks you get. Short of shooting the ad campaign in the basement of the pizzeria in which Hillary Clinton was conspiracy-theorised as masterminding a paedophile ring, it’s hard to see where Balenciaga could have been more extra, creatively speaking. I bet they wish they’d just done a big picture of Santa, sticking some of their gopping sock trainers under the tree of a bolshie Surrey injectables trainee, but the insistence that the market is something more edgily high-art than the reality is the fashion industry’s central creed.

Once again, we find ourselves in the position of wondering how people in fashion are the only ones yet to see Zoolander. I honestly can’t add to the auto-satirical fash-pack lunacy of the following actual statement from Balenciaga: “We strongly condemn child abuse; it was never our intent to include it in our narrative.” Please just take a moment to note how – even in the face of a full-spectrum paedo panic – Balenciaga cannot bring itself to relinquish some pretentious wank about “our narrative”. “It was never our intent to include child abuse in our narrative” is up there with “We accidentally folded corpse violation into our creative concept”…..

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/29/kardashian-teddy-bears-bondage-gear-balenciaga