Panic! At The Runway
On Balenciaga Teddy Bears, angry mobs, and Schiaparelli Beasts.
Last year two events broke headlines and baited angry mobs towards fashion: First, Kanye West sending out “White Lives Matter” shirts during his YZY SZN9 show, staged last-minute during Paris fashion week, and then, a month later, Balenciaga’s Gift Shop and Garde Robe campaigns featuring children among their home objects collection as well as questionable - albeit nearly intelligible - court documents, respectively. In hindsight, slogan t-shirts and punk teddy bears don’t sound evil enough to illicit moral panic, yet they did.
The left went off about nefarious undercurrents of radicalized white supremacists gathering in the shadows while the right conspired of an elite satanic ring controlling media seeking to mutilate and defile children. Across the political spectrum, everyone got their chance to cry wolf.
The shirts and subsequent social media tirade against the backlash culminated in antisemitic comments that lost West his most significant contract with Adidas — allegedly costing the German brand $250 million and leaving them with over $530 million of unsold merchandise — as well as his connection to other brands like Gap and Balenciaga itself; for whom he had just opened their SS23 runway show.
In a failed effort to swiftly end their own controversy, having just been under fire for their association with West, Balenciaga rushed to denounce the images from the Gift Shop campaign, absorbing the blame with a statement that read:
“We sincerely apologize for any offense our holiday campaign may have caused. Our plush bear bags should not have been featured with children in this campaign.”
Yeah! How dare they show children holding… stuffed animals? Even at that time, the outrage seemed blown out of proportion and, no pun intended, infantile. Admitting guilt was a stupid move, in doing so they not only incriminated themselves but validated the lunacy of conspiracy theorists like Fox News showgirl Tucker Carlson who popularized insane claims of a pedophilic cabal through his prime-time show.
It also did not help that Balenciaga went on to file, and rapidly drop, a $25 million lawsuit against the production company and set designer for their Garde-Robe shoot, further damaging the brand’s reputation in the public sphere. In the end, they retreated from the conversation, ceased the useless word-vomit statements, and have since remained in silent penance.
Officially, their attempt to damage control was a failure, a surrender to the hysteric mob. The horde eventually moved on, as it always does. After all, if it’s not fashion there is always war, recession, global warming, or awards season to feign panic over.
“Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces: because their transgressions are many, and their backslidings are increased.”
— Jeremiah 5:6 (King James Version)
Daniel Roseberry’s latest couture collection for Schiaparelli is his most restrained so far, straying from the hyper-stylized surrealism of his previous showings into a streamlined study of the archetypes of Couture. A pinched waist silhouette was repeated across coats, column dresses, and tuxedo pantsuits.
The collection, titled Inferno Couture, drew inspiration from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy as a metaphor for the tormenting insecurity of the artist and the courage of creation. It was, as the show notes described, an homage to doubt.
My favorite look was a column velvet ensemble, hand-painted an iridescent emerald with lime green stones encrusted into a rounded corset whose shape seemed, perhaps unintentionally, reminiscent of the illustrated maps of the Inferno. It is a drastically elegant visual of exaggerated glamour that nonetheless welcomes you to enjoy the mischief of such perverse proportions.
However, the standouts of the show were a triad of looks featuring exquisitely crafted sculptures that appeared to be the taxidermied heads of a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf; symbols of lust, pride, and avarice in the first canto of the poem. The heads, constructed by hand from foam and resin using wool and silk for faux fur, drew an insulted mob back into fashion.
Never mind that it was explicitly stated that the heads were not real with both Roseberry and the official Schiaparelli Instagram account posting behind-the-scenes pictures showcasing the process of making such detailed imitations. It is evident that people are not against them for what they actually are but for their assumptions of what they represent.
Suzy Menkes, one of the few truly great fashion writers, offered a sobering response to the outrage via Instagram, saying:
“It is the reaction of those who have not seen the collection, nor grasp its meaning, who will struggle to understand the show’s purpose”
Therein lies the problem in the current backlash, those accusing Schiaparelli of glamorizing poaching imagery, colonialism, or big game hunting intentionally misinterpret the work with their own cynical worldview. Personally, I did not love the looks. The leopard growling at the bust was the most compelling but I found the other two heads to be ill-placed at the shoulders and their respective garments, a dress and a coat, not particularly appealing on their own. People are allowed to dislike or even disagree with the sculpted heads but I find it pernicious and dishonest to distort reality in order to fit an unfounded conspiracy.
One comment, which to me encapsulated the hostile reaction of the public at large, stated quite matter-of-factly that a fashion show actually doesn’t have a purpose, arguing that it can only “hope to echo or highlight a positive shift already happening in society” furthermore demanding Schiaparelli take “accountability for their use of references”… What idiocy!
These people are actively avoiding having to engage with these dresses in a learned way, not because of their indifference toward fashion but their insolence toward art. It is unacceptable to see art as merely a tool for ideology, we must allow room to provoke, excite, inspire, and question lest we recede to a polite — sterile — groupthink.
Sure, the heads might’ve been too literal an interpretation, but then again, what is literal to a mob of philistines who know the Divine Comedy no more than they do the Old Testament? Part of me thinks this dialogue is precisely what Roseberry was trying to explore when he spoke of the “doubt of intent” in his show notes, or maybe it’s just an incidental alignment that the culture feels like hell.
Balenciaga fell into a bear trap of apologies and retractions and was skinned alive for it. It is my hope that Schiaparelli’s beasts are fierce enough to come out of the Inferno unscathed and look once more upon the stars.
