Balenciaga Ads: Redefining Fashion with Avant-Garde Style

Balenciaga ads do not look like luxury advertising. They look like paparazzi shots, VHS tape, office clutter and a ten-minute Simpsons episode.

That is the whole strategy. Across 28 years and four creative directors, from Nicolas Ghesquiere through Demna to Pierpaolo Piccioli, the Kering-owned house has built its campaigns by borrowing formats nobody else in luxury would touch.

This page covers the named campaigns with their years, photographers and markets, plus the design logic underneath them:

• Which campaigns matter, and who shot each one
• How the print work handles typography, palette and cropping
• What the 2022 withdrawal cost the brand
• Which decisions a designer can actually reuse

Balenciaga advertising covers 28 years of continuous campaign output, 4 creative directors and roughly 12 flagship campaigns, running from the first archived house campaigns in 1998 to the Heart and Body campaign released on February 17, 2026.

The work runs on borrowed formats. Paparazzi shots, VHS tape, office stock imagery, an animated sitcom.

This page covers the named campaigns, the photographers and production companies behind each one, the markets they ran in, and the layout decisions that give the images their flat, deliberately unglamorous look.

Balenciaga Advertising at a Glance

Balenciaga has advertised continuously since 1998 and runs its campaigns through in-house creative direction rather than a named advertising agency. Its best-known campaigns are Spring 2018 Paparazzi, Clones and The Simpsons. The visual signature combines monochrome flash photography, a condensed sans wordmark and street-cast models.

FashionNetwork obtained Balenciaga’s 2021 accounts and reported the house passed the 1 billion euro mark in sales that year.

Which Balenciaga Ad Campaigns Are the Most Famous?

Six campaigns carry the house reputation: Spring 2018 Paparazzi, Clones for Spring 2022, The Simpsons short film in 2021, The Lost Tape for Fall 2022, the withdrawn Gift Shop and Garde-Robe pair in 2022, and Heart and Body in 2026. Each borrows an existing image format.

Spring/Summer 2018 Paparazzi Campaign (2017-2018)

The womenswear campaign was shot by Agence Bestimage, a French celebrity press agency, in front of the Rue Saint Honore store in Paris, and styled by Lotta Volkova.

Models shield their faces with the season’s bags while security walks them to black vans. The frames are uncorrected. Blown highlights, tilted horizons, bodies cropped at the edge.

The menswear half went the other direction, shot by Robbie Augspurger against a marbled studio backdrop in an eighties family portrait format.

AnOther listed it among the must-see campaigns of 2018. It remains the clearest example of Demna borrowing a native image format wholesale rather than imitating one.

Clones, Spring 2022 (2021)

All 44 looks were worn by a single performer, artist Eliza Douglas, replicated across the runway through deepfake and CG face grafting.

Director Quentin Deronzier built the film. Moving Picture Company handled the visual effects under creative director Marcus Dryden, combining machine learning, a real-time games engine and conventional compositing.

The narrative logic behind the visuals was the point: a comment on trend uniformity, staged as literal duplication.

MPC’s team scanned Douglas by photogrammetry and matched light and motion artefacts per clone, according to LBB Online.

The Simpsons | Balenciaga (2021)

Ten minutes, one standing ovation, more than 5 million YouTube views in the first week (The New York Times).

The animated short premiered on October 2, 2021 at the Theatre du Chatelet during Paris Fashion Week, directed by David Silverman, and replaced the Spring 2022 runway show entirely.

Demna emailed Matt Groening in April 2020 to propose it. Homer cannot pronounce the brand name, and Marge’s gold lame gown pulls directly from the Spring 2020 collection.

Silverman told press that animating the fabric behaviour was the hardest part of the production.

The Lost Tape, Fall 2022 (2022)

Photographer: Nadia Lee Cohen.

Cast: Bella Hadid in her first Balenciaga campaign, plus Aya Nakamura, Kit Butler, Zuo Chen, Abdou Diop, Inti Wang and Lina Zhang.

Source format: early nineties fashion advertising, all direct eye contact and warm skin tone.

The collection had already been presented in a runway film shot on VHS by Harmony Korine, titled The Lost Tape / The Show That Never Happened.

Product carried the images: the Hourglass bag, the Crocs bag, Le Cagole, the Excavator boot.

Garde-Robe and Gift Shop (2022)

Balenciaga withdrew both campaigns in November 2022. The Gift Shop images, shot by Gabriele Galimberti, paired child models with plush bear bags and drew immediate and widespread criticism.

The separate Garde-Robe campaign for Spring 2023 was photographed in a Manhattan office set by Joshua Bright (portraits of Nicole Kidman, Isabelle Huppert and Bella Hadid) and Chris Maggio (still life), with set design by Nicolas des Jardins and production by North Six.

Props in one still life included documents referencing a 2008 Supreme Court ruling on child pornography. Balenciaga filed a $25 million claim against North Six, then dropped it.

Creative director Demna apologised publicly on December 2, 2022, and CEO Cedric Charbit announced an internal image review board. Lyst recorded the commercial effect directly: the house fell from number one to number 11 in Q4 2022, then to 18th in Q1 2023.

Anyone studying how brands handle a public failure has a full case file here, including the part where blame landed on freelancers first.

Heart and Body (2026)

Pierpaolo Piccioli replaced Demna on July 10, 2025. His first campaign appeared on October 21, 2025, shot by David Sims inside the Hotel de Maisons-Pozzo di Borgo in Paris with Mona Tougaard and Sandra Murray.

Heart and Body followed on February 17, 2026, again by Sims, covering the Summer 2026 and Fall 2026 collections.

New ambassadors: Winona Ryder, Harris Dickinson, Roh Yoonseo, with Hudson Williams as friend of the house.

Sims shoots the cast in gridded portraits against raw primed canvas. Soft daylight, no flash, no irony. The reversal from the previous decade is total.

Balenciaga Print Ads From the Ghesquiere Years (1998-2012)

Nicolas Ghesquiere ran the house from 1997, aged 25, until 2012, and built the campaign look with two photographers.

• David Sims: the early 2000s work, including Spring 2003, Fall 2003 and Fall 2004
• Steven Meisel: the later saturated editorial images, Fall 2010 and Fall 2012
• Florabotanica, 2012: Kristen Stewart in a “strange garden” set, also by Meisel

Alexander Wang took over for six seasons. His Fall 2013 debut, shot in black and white by Steven Klein with art direction by Pascal Dangin, hid Kristen McMenamy’s face completely.

How Do Balenciaga Print Ads Work Visually?

Balenciaga print ads use a single flash-lit subject, an uncorrected background, and the wordmark set small in a corner or omitted entirely. Layouts avoid the centred symmetry of most luxury print advertising. The palette runs black, white and one desaturated mid-tone.

The wordmark carries the brand load. The current mark is a bespoke condensed sans serif introduced in 2017, replacing a Gotham-based logotype used for roughly 17 years.

Its letterspacing is set tighter than normal reading tolerance, which is exactly why it holds at billboard scale and at 40 pixels on a phone.

Balenciaga campaign layouts break the standard fashion column grid on purpose. Subjects sit off-centre, heads get cropped, and the horizon tilts.

The reading order runs product first, face second, logotype last. Most competitors run it in reverse.

Colour does very little work. A near-monochrome scheme keeps attention on silhouette and volume, which is what the clothes are actually about.

When colour does appear it arrives as a single blunt block, usually a saturated red or acid yellow, at maximum tonal separation from the black.

Print work under Demna kept margins tight rather than airy. The image bleeds. Luxury convention says give the product room to breathe, and Balenciaga spent a decade ignoring that.

There is a real debt to brutalist layout practice in the 2017 to 2023 output: raw system fonts, undesigned-looking spacing, deliberate ugliness treated as a signal of honesty. Whether that reads as smart or as a pose depends on the week you ask me.

How Do Balenciaga TV Commercials Differ From Its Print Ads?

Balenciaga runs film through YouTube and Instagram rather than broadcast television. The films carry narrative and humour that the print work refuses. Three formats dominate: animated short, CGI runway film, and lo-fi video shot on obsolete formats.

The Simpsons | Balenciaga, 2021

Ten-minute animated short, directed by David Silverman.

Homer orders a gift for Marge, Springfield gets flown to Paris, and the entire cast walks a Balenciaga runway while Anna Wintour watches from the front row. The film satirises the industry that paid for it.

Clones, Spring 2022

CGI runway film directed by Quentin Deronzier, VFX by MPC.

Forty-four digital copies of Eliza Douglas walk an empty white runway to a score by BFRND. The audience is rendered too, most of them filming on phones. It is motion work doing an argument, not a product demo.

The Lost Tape, Fall 2022

Runway film shot on VHS by Harmony Korine.

Tracking noise, blown video gain, cameos from Naomi Campbell, Isabelle Huppert and critic Cathy Horyn. The show invitations arrived as physical VHS cassettes with the title handwritten on the label.

How Has Balenciaga Advertising Evolved Since 1997?

Balenciaga advertising has moved through four distinct periods in 28 years, each tied to a creative director. The direction of travel: editorial futurism, then American minimalism, then anti-fashion realism, then a return to portraiture.

The 2017 identity overhaul sits at the centre of that timeline. The whole visual system was rebuilt around one condensed logotype, and every campaign after it inherited that constraint.

Kering reported 20.4 billion euros in group revenue for 2022, with the division containing Balenciaga up 18 percent to 3.9 billion euros, a year that included both the brand’s Lyst peak and its worst month.

Which Agencies Created Balenciaga Advertising?

Balenciaga has no agency of record. The in-house studio directs campaigns, then contracts photographers, production companies and VFX houses per project. Four names recur: North Six, MPC, Agence Bestimage, and stylist Lotta Volkova.

Harley Weir shot the Spring 2017 campaign against a red curtain with Alek Wek, Shujing Zhou and Eliza Douglas. Katy Grannan photographed Justin Bieber for Fall 2021. Juergen Teller shot the Winter 2025 campaign in Biarritz with Nicole Kidman, Claudia Schiffer and Liu Wen.

Lotta Volkova styled the campaigns that defined the Demna period, and her fingerprints are more visible in the final images than any single photographer’s.

Balenciaga appointed its first formal faces of the house in July 2023: Isabelle Huppert and Thai actor PP Krit Amnuaydechkorn. Kim Kardashian became an ambassador in January 2025, two years after publicly cutting ties.

What Can Designers Learn From Balenciaga Ads?

Balenciaga campaigns offer 5 transferable decisions, all of them about restraint in the wrong places. The house spends its budget on concept and casting, not on retouching, and the layouts stay deliberately plain so the idea carries the frame.

• Borrow a native image format instead of imitating one, then let the format’s flaws stay in
• Set the wordmark once, small, and never scale it up to compensate for a weak image
• Limit the palette to black, white and a single mid-tone before adding any accent
• Crop the subject off-centre and let the frame edge cut into the body
• Pick one typeface for the entire identity and refuse a second weight

The last one is the hardest to hold. Most brands add a second face within two years and lose the recognition they paid for.

Worth reading alongside the wider rules of campaign layout and message construction, since Balenciaga breaks several of them on purpose and you should know which ones.

How Do Balenciaga Ads Compare to Gucci and Saint Laurent Ads?

All three sit inside Kering, and all three run separate creative operations. Lyst reported that Gucci and Balenciaga together generated 21 percent of the entire top-20 heat score in Q2 2022, from opposite aesthetic positions.

Gucci under Alessandro Michele ran maximalist, colour-saturated, prop-heavy sets with layered pattern. Balenciaga ran near-monochrome frames with one subject and no set at all. Two Kering houses, two directly opposed answers to the same brief, both working.

Saint Laurent advertising sits between them: black and white like Balenciaga, but shot with classical portrait lighting and a serif-free logotype that reads as heritage rather than utility.

The comparison worth making is with Prada campaign imagery, which uses the same cool detachment but keeps the compositions clean and centred. Prada’s discomfort is psychological. Balenciaga’s is formal.

Gucci campaign work and Dior advertising both keep the logotype large and central. Balenciaga shrank it, which is the single decision that separates its print work from every rival in the category.

What Makes Balenciaga Advertising Work?

The house built a 28-year advertising record on one repeatable move: take a format people already recognise, keep its flaws, and put the clothes inside it.

Paparazzi frames, VHS grain, an animated sitcom, an office desk. None of it looks expensive, which is the point.

The condensed wordmark does the identification work so the image never has to, and that single constraint has survived three creative directors and one reputational collapse.

Piccioli has now reversed the tone toward daylight portraiture, keeping the wordmark and dropping the irony.

Whether that holds is the open question. A consistent brand story is easier to inherit than to rebuild, and Balenciaga is currently doing both at once.

FAQ on Balenciaga Ads

What was the Balenciaga ad controversy in 2022?

Balenciaga pulled two campaigns in November 2022.

The Gift Shop images paired child models with plush bear bags, and a separate Spring 2023 still life included court papers referencing a child pornography ruling. Both were withdrawn.

Who photographed the campaigns Balenciaga pulled?

Gabriele Galimberti shot the Gift Shop images.

Chris Maggio handled the Spring 2023 still life and Joshua Bright the portraits. All three said they had no control over sets or props, and none faced legal action.

Is Balenciaga owned by Gucci?

No. Both sit inside Kering, the French group run by Francois-Henri Pinault, alongside Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta.

Balenciaga was sold in 2001, when the parent company still traded as Gucci Group.

Is Demna still Balenciaga’s creative director?

No. Demna moved to Gucci in 2025 after a decade at the house.

Pierpaolo Piccioli started on July 10, 2025, following 25 years at Valentino, and released his first Balenciaga campaign that October.

Why did Kim Kardashian return to Balenciaga?

Kardashian cut ties in November 2022, then signed as brand ambassador in January 2025.

She pointed to a long relationship with the house and its design work under Demna. Neither party disclosed the terms.

Why did Balenciaga make a Simpsons episode?

Demna emailed Matt Groening in April 2020 with the idea, having grown up watching the show.

The ten-minute short let the house mock fashion cliches while replacing a conventional Spring 2022 runway presentation.

Who is Lotta Volkova?

The stylist behind most Demna-era campaigns, including Spring 2018 Paparazzi.

Volkova set the street-cast look, the awkward proportions and the nineties grunge references that competitors copied for years afterward.

Which model appears in the most Balenciaga campaigns?

Eliza Douglas. The artist opened or closed every Balenciaga show from Fall 2016 and featured in most campaigns of that period.

She then wore all 44 looks in the Clones film through digital duplication.

Why is the logo so small in Balenciaga print ads?

The condensed wordmark stays legible at any size, so it gains nothing from scale.

Shrinking it pushes the eye onto the product first, which reverses the standard luxury layout where the logotype dominates the frame.

Are Balenciaga ads deliberately ugly?

During the Demna years, yes. Blown flash, tilted frames and uncorrected backgrounds read as honesty against heavily retouched luxury imagery.

Piccioli reversed that in 2025 with soft daylight portraits shot by David Sims.

Conclusion

Balenciaga ads reward close reading more than almost any other campaign imagery in luxury fashion.

The art direction stays consistent even when the tone swings hard: one subject, a flat palette, a wordmark that never grows to fill a weak frame.

Track the credits and the pattern sharpens. Harley Weir, Nadia Lee Cohen, Juergen Teller and David Sims each brought a different register to the same set of brand codes.

The commercial record follows the creative one. Three quarters at the top of the Lyst Index, a drop to eighteenth after the 2022 withdrawal, then a slow climb back.

Study the campaign photography, the casting and the typographic restraint as separate problems.

Then steal the restraint.