The fashion world is not especially known for its morals. And yet even by fashion’s standards, this week’s BDSM bear controversy has been a weird one.
The esteemed, celeb-loved Spanish fashion house Balenciaga has been slammed for putting out images of young kids holding teddy bears wearing kinky bondage gear. The odd pics feature in its Christmas advertising campaign. They show sad-eyed toddlers holding teddies that are dolled up in fishnet tops, lock-and-key collars and wrist restraints. Normally, you’d have to go to some dingy club on a dark street in Soho to see get-up like that. Now, Balenciaga is putting it on fluffy bears and giving those bears to actual children.
In one of the images the kid is holding her X-rated teddy while standing on a bed. In another, a child is lying face down on a couch, looking miserable, surrounded by wine glasses and with two of the weird bears propped up behind her. One of the bears appears to be in a kind of leather harness, the sort you’d see at a BDSM party.
It gets worse. Another photo features a handbag on a pile of documents. Seems innocent. It’s a nice bag. Only internet sleuths have zoomed in and discovered that one of the documents is a printout of something to do with Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition, the 2002 US Supreme Court ruling that struck down a section of the Child Pornography Prevention Act and ruled that fake child porn is protected speech. Wow.
This needs an explanation, surely? It cannot be a coincidence that an ad campaign with very young children holding sex teddies also makes a sly reference to a court ruling that said not all sexualised depictions of kids should be illegal. Someone involved in this, whether someone at Balenciaga or someone in the set-designer or photography teams it hired for this campaign, knew what they were doing here.
Balenciaga is blaming the photographer, and is even threatening to sue him. It has apologised for the pics, and for the inclusion of ‘unsettling documents’, and has wiped the campaign from its Instagram. The photographer, meanwhile, insists he had nothing to do with choosing the products or the models. He just set up the lighting and clicked. So no one’s to blame? You know how it is – you take a few photos to promote your products and, darn, you accidentally include children with pervert teds and a nod to a ruling that dismantled part of the child-porn law. Could happen to anyone.
It’s hard to know what’s worse. That someone thought it would be fun to put dejected-looking kids alongside bears that look like they’ve just stumbled out of a queer kink dungeon in West Hollywood or that no one at Balenciaga thought: ‘Is this a little odd?’ Balenciaga is a fashion power-house. It is loved by the Kardashians. It’s all over red carpets. And yet its famous attention to detail appears to have escaped it when it was shown an image of a kid on a couch being gawked at by a fluffy blue bear in an outfit straight out of Cruising.
In another way, though, it makes messed-up sense that no one in this fashion chain of command stopped to wonder if this might all be a bit strange. Because the sad fact is that paedo chic is everywhere right now. In a world saturated with images of kids in adult clothing, and when children bop along to pop and rap tunes that are sexually explicit, and when it is not uncommon to see kids petting men-as-pups at Pride marches or laughing along with drag queens in skimpy outfits, why would anyone bat an eyelid at a pic of a girl on a bed with a kinky bear?
Paedo chic is one of the most worrying trends of our time. We seem to be witnessing a surge in the paedophilic sensibility.
Five Feet of Fury
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