The French brand Balenciaga unveiled, in collaboration with the video game company Quantic Dream, a new campaign film illustrating, if still needed, the appetite of its artistic director Demna Gvasalia for dystopian narratives.

By Ludmilla Intravaia 

A few days after the unveiling of Balenciaga's Spring 2022 fashion show using the deepfake multimedia special-effects technique (more info in this Boudoir Numérique article), the French brand presented the promotion campaign of its Fall 2021 collection, now available in its stores.

The campaign, carried out with the assistance of the French video game development company Quantic Dream, was made by motion capture, a movement capture technique, used in particular in cinema and video games for recording the movements of objects and living beings, in order to render them visually on the screen. Discover the result of this collaboration of Balenciaga with the world of gaming, in the video below.

Nasa technical parka with Space patches, fluffy yellow faux fur jacket, hoodie with all-over paint spots, destroyed crew-neck with ripped knit ..., if the film amply showcases the clothes from the Fall 21 collection, which by the way was already presented in the video game Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, last December (more info in this Boudoir Numérique article), such is not its only interest.

The sources of inspiration to which Balenciaga's film refers also turn out to be an enlightening decryption grid to delve into the imaginary world of the brand's artistic director, Demna Gvasalia, clearly fond of dystopian tales.

Thus, the uniform crowds of the intro of Balenciaga's film are furiously reminiscent of the succession of worn out workers from Fritz Lang's opus Metropolis. The influence of this film, denouncing the oppression of the working class by a privileged ruling elite, has not waned in popular culture since 1927, when it was released.

The gaze exchanged between the two protagonists of Balenciaga's film echoes that exchanged by Winston Smith (John Hurt) with O'Brien (Richard Burton), in the scene of the two minutes of hatred of the film 1984.

This movie by Michael Radford, released in 1984, is adapted from the novel by George Orwell, describing a totalitarian society inspired by Stalinism and Nazism.

 The male character in the film seems (almost) as lost upon entering the virtual world of Balenciaga as Keanu Reeves, aka Neo, discovering the Matrix, in 1999.

Signed by the Wachowski sisters, The Matrix trilogy depicts the enslavement of human beings by machines, through a virtual simulation, the Matrix.

And does the reunion of the two lovebirds of Balenciaga, under a blossoming sakura, make you think of an immortal movie scene?

For Le Boudoir Numérique, it inevitably has to do with the moment shared by Winston Smith and Julia (Suzanna Hamilton) in the verdant English countryside of 1984.

The cynical use of masterpieces from the history of cinema and literature to sell the products of our capitalist society is not new. Isn't Apple's 1984 spot celebrated in business schools around the world as the best ad ever?

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