Balenciaga Jersey Fall 2021 Ad Campaign

Review of Balenciaga Jersey Fall 2021 Ad Campaign by Photographer Daniel Roché

Balenciaga checks into virtual reality with a new campaign by photographer Daniel Roché. With a smart and fun tone of ironic tension, the Fall 2021 Jersey campaign puts the focus on the brand’s T-shirt and sweatshirt offerings.

Against a starkly minimalist background, Roché’s portraits capture his subjects styled simply in T-shirts or sweatshirts on top of oversized, distressed jeans. But the most striking styling features of the imagery are the subjects’ ubiquitous VR headsets. Completely lost in their own virtual worlds, they seem oblivious to the fact that, in the real world, they are being photographed. Some of them hold controllers and stand in action-ready positions, while others seem more tuned out from their physical bodies. (As we tend to think of video games and technology being mostly consumed by young people, it’s also a thoughtful touch that the cast features a few older models.)

The photographs thus tap into an intriguing twofold sense of voyeurism. In the first place, we have these characters traveling through the virtual looking glass and becoming interactive spectators of new worlds. Then we have the second layer of us as spectators, seeing these characters seeing – but we don’t see what they see, and they don’t see us seeing them. From simple imagery arises a heady blend of seen and unseen, real and virtual, presence and absence.

The virtual reality motif also smartly echoes Balenciaga’s main Fall 2021 campaign, a digitally rendered film that explored romance in a digital dystopia, made in partnership with video-game studio Quantic Dream. This time featuring real humans instead of 3D avatars, the campaign here brilliantly develops the themes of futurism, once again raising questions on identity and others, and how they are reshaped by technology. Balenciaga has its eyes fixed on the future – even if we can’t see what it’s looking at.