You’ve definitely seen the latest Balenciaga campaign. You either saw it online when it dropped last week, or you did 20 or so years ago when the images were first taken.
The brand repurposed paparazzi images from the early 2000s and digitally altered them to integrate the contemporary version of its Le City Bag. The campaign stars Natasha Poly, Tyra Banks, Amber Valletta and — perhaps most iconically — Paris Hilton, in pink Juicy Couture velour, no less. It’s a classic case of ‘chronically online time machine’: old things become new again, an exercise in postmodern virality.
The campaign, which also features a faux watermark inspired by photo agencies like Getty or Backgrid, is a clever way of contextualising its storied It-bag with icons of then that are still relevant now — with the bag being one of them. The bag has transcended history, and three Balenciaga creative directors, as it was first designed by Nicolas Ghesquière in the early 2000s. While the execution of the campaign certainly reaffirms the place of the bag in sartorial pop culture history, it’s tainted by the fact that this pap-shot-as-campaign concept is not at all novel. If anything, it’s a little overdone. Demna himself executed it once before for spring 2018.
Paparazzi redux
That fashion and celebrity culture are deeply intertwined is a tale as old as time — or as old as the 20th century, give or take. The equation is simple: brand pays famous face to wear the thing, famous face wears the thing, non-famous face (that would be you) buys the thing. Everybody wins! Until fatigue sets in. Now, it’s not enough for celebrities to be seen wearing something to inspire a purchase. We need to believe that they wear it organically because they want to. In turn, this has led to an abundance of sneaky fashion placements for celebrities to wear in their daily life and be — oops! — unintentionally photographed. These images are then repurposed as campaigns. The thing is, we now see right through this, too.
Matthieu Blazy’s Bottega Veneta (may it rest in peace) cracked the code in late 2023 when it dressed Kendall Jenner and A$AP Rocky in head-to-toe looks and sent them out into the streets of Los Angeles to be inevitably photographed. Images of them were all over the internet, and media outlets, including Vogue.com, wrote about their looks — because they did look good. It was only after the images were all over the internet and after everyone had written about them that Bottega Veneta released the images as a campaign. As it turns out, they had collaborated with Getty and Backgrid to have the images of Jenner and Rocky licensed to be used as advertising. These days, we pay more attention to these “organic” paparazzi shots than we do to any fashion campaign, as our culture has shifted in favour of the candid and lo-fi. Here, Bottega Veneta made us look by making us think we were looking at the latter when in reality, we were looking at the former — a meticulously executed coup. One that immediately peaked, though it keeps returning.
GCDS designer Giuliano Calza summed up to Showstudio why we’re so drawn to paparazzi campaigns last year after the release of his own version: a spring 2024 collection photographed “on the sly” around Beverly Hills. “There’s a growing demand for authenticity,” he said. “In our distorted reality, many lack the means to connect with dreamy campaigns or indulge in excessive storytelling.” Except that by the time he launched his version, fashion had already gone overboard with embracing the concept. Gucci took a similar approach with Dakota Johnson in January 2023. Poster Girl worked with Mel Ottenberg on a series of cable news-like images later that year. Sunnei, Saks Potts, Priscavera, Moschino, and, perhaps most memorable, Jimmy Choo all did this over the past two decades. The latter gets credit for casting Nicole Richie as its paparazzi victim in 2006, at the arguably peak of her popularity as paparazzi catnip.
Celebrity and, therefore, paparazzi culture are deeply ingrained in our lives now. We see them on our feeds, we sometimes stumble into them (especially if you live somewhere like New York City). We like them or are at least drawn to them, to Calza’s point, because they make famous folk — those on our TV screens and playlists — appear like us. They grocery shop, they fight with their partners, they walk their dogs. In turn, these images have proved worthy marketing vehicles. Who could forget when Jacob Elordi was photographed carrying a Bottega Veneta Andiamo bag while holding two coffee cups with one hand? We all saw it, the internet made sure of it. And now that is the viral image that launched an It-bag. But by now, we’re all too familiar with paparazzi culture, too. Thanks to social media accounts like Deuxmoi, we also now know that celebrities stage paparazzi shoots. We know that brands place products on celebrities outside the red carpet. We know, and we know too much.
If anything, the Bottega Veneta hack and this digitally altered set of images by Balenciaga show that even the most candid-looking moments can be manufactured. Now that street style outside of fashion shows is also full of brand placements (just look at all the influencers wearing Spring/Summer clothes in the middle for the winter to attend an Autumn/Winter show) and celebrity style has proven to be vulnerable to the powers that be (meaning, marketing), can we really trust a pap-shot? And, most importantly, can a pap-shot really sway us to open our wallets?
In 1962, Richard Avedon photographed Suzy Parker and Mike Nichols for Harper’s Bazaar in an editorial that saw them trying to escape the paparazzi. The shoot is said to have been inspired by the media frenzy around Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton following Cleopatra. For the January issue of Vogue Italia, Steven Meisel staged a range of paparazzi campaigns that poked fun at this very same phenomenon. The fun has been had, the wool’s been pulled back from our eyes. What’s next?
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