Balenciaga Tried to Blame Contractors. It Failed.
I spoke to photographer Gabrele Galimberti about what really happened with the brand's disastrous holiday campaign.
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a newsletter about Chanel’s advent calendar, which had gone viral on TikTok for seeming cheap yet costing $825. The incident signaled a huge shift in culture, in which consumers delighted like never before in holding brands accountable for perceived offenses — even if those simply involved selling products of questionable quality or value.
Well, it’s almost Christmas again, and Balenciaga rudely woke up to this reality a couple of weeks ago, when consumers across social media expressed dismay and outrage over two ad campaigns, one which featured children posed with teddy bear bags that people associated with BDSM, and another that featured as props documents from a Supreme Court case about child p*rn*gr*phy.
The way Balenciaga handled the ordeal, issuing a number of statements before accepting full responsibility, only stoked the online public’s anger and disbelief. Last week, the brand filed a $25 million lawsuit against set designer Nicholas Des Jardins and production company North Six over the campaign with the court documents. Balenciaga seemed to be using them as a scapegoat, which didn’t go over well with consumers who understand that big corporate fashion brands like Balenciaga don’t release ad campaigns without numerous tiers of approval. Unlike Balenciaga, Des Jardins wasn’t famous or well known. Neither was North Six. I heard from a few people working in the fashion industry who were stunned to see Balenciaga appearing to use its might to blame contractors for the poorly received campaigns. On TikTok, fashion influencers like Erica de Lima called the lawsuit over items like the court papers that the brand claimed not to have approved for use in the ads “an insult to my intelligence,” adding, “Me as a little influencer, when I create a collab video, they have to approve the concept before I film the video, after I film, the hashtags, the caption — and you are telling me that a massive Christmas campaign, no one from Balenciaga saw it?”
Photographer Gabriele Galimberti, who photographed the pulled campaign featuring children, was not a target of the dropped lawsuit, but absorbed much of the public’s ire. The images were based on Galimberti’s series Toy Stories, which features striking photos of kids ages three to six with their toys. The series became a book that came out in 2014 and went on to have three printings. Galimberti applied the same visual style to another series, Ameriguns, that depicts Americans with their guns. A statement on his website about the series reads, “These often disturbing portraits, together with the accompanying stories based on interviews, provide an unexpected and uncommon view of what the institution of the Second Amendment really represents today.”
Galimberti spoke to me Tuesday afternoon by Zoom from Italy, where he lives. Since the Balenciaga campaign came out, he’s lost photography jobs and an exhibition, and received thousands of hateful messages, including death threats. He said that since Balenciaga released its latest statement on Friday announcing that it had decided not to take legal action against Des Jardins and North Six and accepting full responsibility for both campaigns, things are starting to calm down. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tell me about the original Toy Stories series. How did you get the idea?
It started in 2009. I had a travel column in the magazine La Repubblica. Every week, I was publishing photos and stories [about] traveling around the world by couch-surfing. A few weeks before I left for this trip — I went to 58 countries in two years — a friend called asking, “Can you take some photos of my daughter?” When I got there, Alessia, her daughter, was organizing her toys. I simply helped her to organize the toys. I took some photos, and that was the first one [in the series].
Since I was couch-surfing, I was always staying with somebody. I simply asked them, “Do you know someone with with kids?” So people were helping me to find families who wanted to be part of the project. Every time I took a new photo, of course, the parents were there. I have all the releases of the parents of the kids that I photographed because I made a book [of the series]. Everything was going fine until a week ago. It's probably my biggest success.
How did the Balenciaga campaign job start?
Balenciaga called me at the end of September. The first email that I received was from someone that worked closely with [Demna], and the email says basically, “Hello, Gabriele Galimberti blah, blah, blah. We are Balenciaga, Demna saw your work, we like your style, we like Toy Stories, we would like you to do the same thing for us.” My agent started a negotiation with them, we got the deal, so I went to Paris and I shot the photos over two days.
The campaign was my first and only work for the fashion industry. I said yes because they pay better than documentary work. The amount of money they offered is enough to pay the rent for my house in Milan for about 18 months. I'm 45. I have to pay my rent, bills, and I want to go out to dinner with my girlfriend. So if somebody comes to me and says, “We’ll pay you well for two days,” it's not easy to say no.
And what happened next?
After I decided to take this job, there were two or three weeks of emails between me and Balenciaga staff. There were always six, seven people in the same email going back and forth between me and them. In these emails, they were proposing the kids, the objects, and the location. My opinion was rarely asked and only in regards to the choice of color for the walls, curtains, or the like. They were not [otherwise] asking my opinion. They were telling me, “We decided that these are the six kids that we want to photograph.” And I received a PDF with the photos of the kids. I said, “OK, I like them.” And then they said, “[This is] the location.” I said, “OK” — because I'm a documentary photographer, that's the way I work. When I went to Paris, there were, I would say, 25 people on the set who work for Balenciaga. I was there just with my assistant and my agent.
What was the atmosphere like?
There were people from the visual office, marketing, stylists, the makeup artist, set designer plus their assistant. There were three or four people bringing stuff in and out from [other] rooms. There were a couple of workers painting the walls, moving the beds — a huge staff of people. They were preparing the set and we were using a mannequin to prepare the picture. So there was a mannequin at the center of the photo while we were organizing the set with all the objects they were bringing into the room.
I was kind of directing, because the eye is mine. So I was telling them, “I prefer more on this side, on that side.” Most of the objects were things like shoes and sunglasses. The objects that are at the center of the scandal are the two bear bags. I took some photos. The photos were going from my computer to someone else’s computer, one of these workers. And they were sending the photos to someone else at the headquarters of Balenciaga. I don't know if it was Demna. And then we were waiting for one or two hours to get approval. And once we got it approved, they said, “OK, the picture is approved, let's bring the kid in.” So we removed the mannequin. The parents came with the kid, and in five minutes we took the picture.
When they presented me the whole collection, they told me, “It's a collection inspired by punks.” I believed that because I don’t work in fashion, and even the objects for dogs [come] with [spikes] and punk elements. But I didn't see BDSM because I don’t work with [BDSM things]. For me, those bags were punk. So we took some photos with the kids for two days. And then I came back to Italy, I delivered the six photos that they selected, I sent my invoice, and that's it.
And at some point, the campaign went up and the backlash started.
Three weeks later, when they started to use the photos on Instagram and the website, the first one or two days they got positive and negative reactions. I posted one photo on my Instagram account. And I got somebody telling me, “This is nice work, it's a perfect combination between your style and a fashion brand.” And also somebody telling me, “I don't like these photos, you're selling your point-of-view to a fashion brand.” I was ready to manage that. But I was not ready at all to be accused of being a pedophile.
I don't know exactly how everything started, but somebody said, “This photographer is a pedophile. He's taking photos of these kids with BDSM things.” Within five hours, I received thousands of messages. Then Fox News did a piece on TV and everything exploded. And in that moment, Balenciaga decided to remove the photos from Instagram and the website. And they replaced that campaign with the previous campaign [with the court documents]. And in that moment, Balenciaga made the first statement, which in my opinion was not clear at all.
They said, these bags shouldn't have been photographed with children. And then they said, we are investigating who is responsible for putting these documents in the second campaign — and people thought that it was me.
So for like a week, I was sending Balenciaga five to ten emails per day asking them, please make a new statement because people have to understand that I'm not guilty of anything, because I'm receiving messages from people telling me, “We know where you live, we're coming to kill you.” Somebody found my phone number and published my number on Twitter inviting people to call me. I received dozens of phone calls in the middle of the night, like, “You have to die, pedophile.”
That sounds very scary.
It was, it was terrible for a week. Then Balenciaga, around a week later, said, “We are suing [production company] North Six, we are suing the set designer.” Again, for a completely different campaign, not the campaign I was working on. A few media [published headlines] like, “Balenciaga is suing Galimberti.” So I'm suing now a few media [outlets]. It was only a couple of days ago that everything started calming down because finally Balenciaga said, “We are not suing anyone, it's our fault.” And Demna said, “It's my responsibility, I made the wrong choices and blah, blah, blah.” But they needed ten days.
Will you continue the Toy Stories series?
I want to continue it. I'm not going to stop taking photos of children and toys just because this happened. Of course, I'm super sad because now a lot of people are trying to destroy my whole career.
You did a series in a similar visual style to Toy Stories called Ameriguns of Americans with their firearms. How did you start that project?
I've been traveling in the U.S. since 2005. I love the States, my ex-girlfriend is American. I traveled to Texas many times in the years that we were together. Then I was in Kansas in 2018 taking photos for National Geographic of a dinosaur researcher. One day I was driving outside of Kansas City. I saw this huge gun store. That was the first time I entered a gun shop. They were selling rifles, machine guns, bazookas, everything. That was the first surprise, like, Whoa, you're not only selling guns, you're selling everything for an army.
Then I started to speak with one of the customers who was curious to know why an Italian guy was there [asking] about guns. He was buying a gun, so I asked him, “Is this your first gun?” And he said, “Of course not, I have more than 60 at home.” And for me it was natural to say, “Can I come and take a picture of you?” And he said OK. So I went to his house and I applied my Toy Stories vision to that topic. A few days later, I was driving from Kansas to Texas, and I decided to go into another gun shop and try again. Within three days, I had two photos of Americans and guns. A few weeks later when I went back to Washington D.C. to deliver my work to National Geographic, I told my editor I took those two photos along the way. So they sponsored me to continue the project for a year. I took 45 photos in more than 35 states. I photographed all kinds of people — white, Black, Latinos, rich, poor, boys, girls, families, Republicans, Democrats. And I made a book called The Ameriguns.
People reading this who want to see more can do so on your Instagram feed, which you’ve said Balenciaga suggested you make private?
I made a few screenshots of the messages that I received, and I sent these screenshots to Balenciaga. I said, “I'm receiving these messages, guys, please help me because it's not nice to be attacked.” And they told me, “May we suggest to limit your accounts, turning it to private?” I said, “What? So you are asking me to hide? I'm not guilty. I don't want to hide. I built my community in 10 years of work. It's my portfolio. It's the way I get jobs. Why should I hide my account and put it in private for something that I didn't do? I didn't do anything wrong. Actually, I want to speak out.” If I closed my account it would mean to people, “He's the guilty guy.”
