The recent Balenciaga scandal – their new campaign featured images of slack-jawed children holding teddy bears wearing bondage gear – highlighted the way that the fashion industry likes to use "edgy" material to draw in its sophisticated customers. The company are trying to redeem themselves by suing the people who put the adverts together, but they surely knew just what they were doing: they simply misjudged it this time.
Kathleen Stock at UnHerd:
As with Balenciaga’s attraction to the gothic, the fashion world more generally has long played about with savagery and psychic darkness for the purposes of selling people things they don’t need. In practice this often means glamourising various terrible things done to women. Alexander McQueen’s first two (visually stunning) collections were called “Jack the Ripper and his Victims” and “The Highland Rapes”. A 2007 Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign was highly suggestive of gang rape, and a 2003 Sisley campaign of bestiality between a woman and a bull.
Generally speaking, the fashion industry is littered with pictures of young women with a sexualised, exploited, fetishised, or downright quasi-paedophilic vibe. And female consumers apparently lap it up — perhaps because they tell themselves, accurately, that promoting abusive sex is not the direct point. As with everything else in the fashion world, nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes.
Yet when you look at some of the blank-eyed skeletal young models who still tend to be preferred by designers, it’s impossible to maintain that the casual brutality dished out to women in the representational realm of fashion doesn’t have consequences for the real one. Models are treated by the fashion world as living dolls you can pick from a book purely on the basis of appearance, then dress them up, choose their poses, control their food intake, and fly them around the world to serve you, until you don’t want them anymore. Granted, not every model is skinny or young these days, but even those who aren’t are just as heavily objectified — every personalised aspect of them being diminished to a commercially favourable appearance, interchangeable with some other commercially favourable appearance, should the originally-booked girl have a breakdown or get a breakout.
But at least most models are adults, technically anyway. For me, an under-explored aspect of the Balenciaga scandal is the apparent fact that parents somewhere have let their very young children be photographed in these campaigns. It is bad enough to represent grown adults as slack-jawed, vacant children, but a lot worse to turn children into slack-jawed, vacant little adults….
Why the backlash this time? Stock puts down the current interest in paedophilia to the fact that "there have never been so many culturally acceptable ways to objectify your own child". Well maybe, but surely the more immediate explanation here is that paedophilia has recently become a real object of concern, with so many worrying cases coming to light. The fear is that it's creeping back in under the trans umbrella, as children are increasingly being sexualised and are being exposed to sexual grooming. The Mermaids trustee who was involved with an organisation that promoted services to paedophiles is just one example…the spread of sexualised drag artists appearing in schools…the list goes on…
Research published by Cambridge University Press in 2018 notes that some men ‘seeking gender reassignment’ do so ‘to facilitate or normalise paedophilia’. ‘This latter small group described gender reassignment as a means by which to increase their intimate contact with children, which they viewed to be more socially acceptable in a female role’, researchers found.
These facts can’t be covered up by a wig, a smear of lippy and thick foundation. Yet in schools, as elsewhere, messages about trans inclusion have rolled out a rainbow carpet for abusive men to stroll into children’s lives.
Mick Hartley 
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