Balenciaga under creative director Demna Gvasalia casts an eerie image, teetering in between what is real and what is warped. Their latest campaign, released earlier this week, is presented as a fashion-infused newscast with a dystopian feel. (On Twitter, a version loops for 24 hours.) Newscasters are reminiscent of robots with glitched, marionette mouths. In the Gattaca-style world, all of which is outfitted by Balenciaga, the mood is apocalyptic and carefully calculated to be both familiar and unsettling. One news item is about how traffic jams have been replaced by a stream of clone cars seamlessly tailgating each other at a rapid speed in full Human Centipede mode. Another story reports that the planets are aligning, causing some kind of eclipse that presents an opportunity to show off Balenciaga’s slender black sunglasses. Perhaps the most chilling part of the video loop is the meaningless ticker blips of info juxtaposed with headlines like “Where is all the water going?” The inane, incorrect factoids, a bevy of fake news, if you will, include: “Researchers match on Tinder in Antarctica,” “Rodents gnaw because their teeth never stop growing,” and the oddly deep-cutting line of “One in a million isn’t that rare.”
The concept behind the newscast came from the Paris-based artist Will Benedict. His prior work floats in between reality and distorted fantasy. One of his videos includes an interview with Charlie Rose interviewing an alien. While most of the imagery from the Balenciaga campaign seems plucked out of a science fiction movie, much of this is based on actual images. “I try to find things that are very real, and very much a part of our very much real lived world,” says Benedict. “In the end, you don’t know where you are standing. I like that unstable kind of place.” In one part, there is a revolving whirlpool accompanied with the former question of “Where is all the water going?” It is the largest drain hole in the world, the Monticello Dam Morning Glory Spillway in Napa Valley.