The new Balenciaga campaign between metaverse viewers and cyber-punk armors

UPDATE 11/04/2021: In the video of the campaign, here is anywhere, directed by the Danish artist Yilmaz Sen, Balenciaga represents a different and dematerialized world, where the metaverse codes are not visible yet they are everywhere. The result is at the same time dramatically sharp and delicate, it touches on various topics thanks to a narrative system that literally explores the concept of the house: the models, similar to avatars, move in an equal and continuous room on the notes of Per Elisa by Beethoven, transforming and changing outfits simultaneously with the change of landscape that can be glimpsed from the windows of the room, sometimes controlled by them.

The video explores the concept of space that has lost its measure in a digital world and of time that remains a constant flux thanks to the brilliant perspective of the camera, but at the same time the only thing over which the characters still have no control. Yilmaz Sen has collaborated with Balenciaga since the days of 2019, first with the paparazzi campaign and later with the video of the Resort of the same year, in which the models stare blankly at the camera as their bodies slowly begin to twist like puppets and an alienating white noise resonates in the background.

Between last night and this morning some looks from the new spring 22 campaign were revealed on Balenciaga's social profile, an avant-garde show with a cyberpunk taste created by Demna Gvasalia in collaboration with Hiroto Ikeuchi, Japanese artist, designer and model maker famous throughout the world for its high-tech futuristic designs.

On the same day that Gucci parades with the most iconic pieces of its archive for its 100th anniversary, Balenciaga projects us into the near future of the metaverse with cybernetic masks, visors and armor: two diametrically opposed ways of making fashion, of imagining tomorrow.
The campaign explores on a theme already extensively elaborated by Gvasalia in the past runways, the dystopian imagery of augmented bodies and the apocalyptic upper hand of technology over man. A sort of sci-fi futurism that continues the trend of the presentation of the FW21 collection transformed into a video game, Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, set in a New York populated by drones and flying buses, as well as a series of in-game characters who wore the looks.
Also this time the brand has deleted all previous images from social profiles, a tried and tested strategy that, if at the beginning alarmed the maison’s final farewell to social networks, it is now an unequivocal spy for users of the upcoming release of a new Balenciaga project.

Trench coats and over-size puffers, baggy jeans, t-shirts with the logo, extra large shoppers, the statement pieces of Demna’s aesthetics are enriched with robotic masks.
The masks, the real trend of the season made such by the collaboration between Balenciaga, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West with accessories ranging from fetish to grotesque, in this case become robotic thanks to Ikeuchi, inspired by mecha or mech, huge robots typical of manga and anime of the Japanese tradition.
The culmination of the campaign revealed so far is a real Skeleton that seems to come directly from Aliens, a 1986 film by Ridley Scott, and which takes the reflection on the relationship between man and technology on a completely new level.