🐌 balenciaga was where we lost
at the time of the balenciaga scandal1 i defended it vehemently. i liked the artist (and disliked the commercialisation of art by a big company) but in the interest of preventing the gradual contagion of all boundary-defying artistic expression by morality policing right wing pundits i held the line.
the right is heavily influenced by its politicisation of memes designed to make large groups of people feel big things. disgust and discomfort are an obvious lever for them to pull, unintentionally or not, to get people to follow extremely satisfying, though rarely beneficial, political positions.
i'm still not quite sure why the left wing decided to abandon that line. perhaps it was the aesthetic distaste of defending a large company that happened to be in the right place at the right time to warrant a defence. maybe it was because they didn't consider the implications and second order effects of conceding to an insatiable demand for moral outrage by conservatives. maybe at the end of a multi-year campaign of bullshit targeting the left over CRT, drag queens and transing kids they were just plain fucking exhausted and decided they could let one slide.
unfortunately balenciaga was where we lost the truth. it was the case study the right-wing establishment needed to double down on their post-truth strategy of abandoning reality for vibes. the shoot was perfect for this, it made people feel off (as art often does), yet had no tangible morally repugnant position, a highly reasonable explanation2, and essentially no need for compensation, no injury, no real action to be taken.
i don't know if this was a winnable fight, but had the line been held, we would have held the last block in the wall - that any substance at all is required for an ill to be conceived, platformed and propagandised. the left won't often admit it, but the right wing is incisive in their critique of liberalism, and frequently speaks to real concerns and issues important to their base. it is objectively true that the status of white uneducated conservatives is dropping dramatically, and selfishly it makes sense for them to attempt to prevent this, even if the party that claims to do so is fucking them over.
not so for balenciaga. this was vibes based alone, and vibes can be manufactured from nothing, from propaganda outlets, from tweets, from AI-generated slop. the post-truth trend of conservatives has only become more disturbing, with even Trump falling for stories like Haitian immigrants capturing and eating people's pets. now you need only point to a neo-nazi complaining at a council meeting, or a 911 phone call, neither of which are primary evidence of anything, to concoct a story from thin air. we were already post-fact but we are now firmly post-truth. there is no meaning to the stories anymore, they do not signify any real feeling, any real moral injury, anything relevant to discourse. conservatives realize this intuitively, and behave as such. online discourse and debate has degenerated into substanceless optics, it is now pointless to argue with a mainstream conservative.
balenciaga, ultimately, was utterly pointless except as an opportunity for the right to squat in a cultural space and corrode everything it borders. today it is commonly cited as a signifier of satanic pedophilia, celebrities associated with it are disavowed by the right and webs of deranged speculation and corkboarding continue to grow outward from the site of our loss.
given that vibes are now all that is required to signify something for destruction by the right, and given the way the human bias towards contagion works, the right has the perfect psychological bioweapon.
this doesn't mean they'll win, but it's going to be really fucking annoying to deal with.
footnotes
photographer gabrielle galimberti (an artist interested in how objects represent people) created an exhibition known as "toy stories" where children were stood, often stony-faced, amongst their favorite toy things. this, like much art, was co-opted for a commercial shoot for the fashion brand balenciaga, which replicated it using balenciaga products that were criticized for being too adult to be near children, as well as other adult accoutrement like wine glasses. the right wing read the stony faced children amongst adult-coded objects holding handbags with edgy goth/punk aesthetics (including straps many perceived to be BDSM) as satanic pedophile signalling and launched a campaign that eventually rolled the artist, balenciaga, celebrities, trans people and ultimately the left underfoot.↩
an artist's work is replicated with commercial goods, some handbags (the bears were bags) are pulled out of a warehouse because a producer thinks teddy bear = child, and european sensibilities that are better attuned to punk/goth aesthetics accidentally go viral in a more puritanical country.↩