Review of Balenciaga High Summer 2025 Ad Campaign by Photographer Roe Ethridge
For its High Summer 2025 campaign, Balenciaga takes a meta-luxury turn, channeling the polished fantasy of vintage travel advertisements while gently poking at their constructed nature. Photographed by Roe Ethridge—whose practice often lives in the uncanny overlap between fashion, fine art, and commercial imagery—the campaign is set against artificial beachscapes and digitally enhanced seascapes, where powdery sand, painted skies, and stock-photo sunsets create a stylized vision of resort life that feels both escapist and eerily composed. The result is less wish you were here and more you’ve seen this before, haven’t you?
The casting, featuring Sonja, Estelle, Claudia, Liz, Simon, and Bai, maintains Balenciaga’s now-signature mood of cultivated detachment. The models don a blend of High Summer, Summer, and Fall 2025 pieces—bikinis with oversized BB buckles, velvet swimsuits, exaggerated outerwear, and plush jersey dresses—all styled to push the boundaries of vacationwear into the surreal. There’s something quietly humorous in the layering of a Bathrobe Stola or Oversized Boxy Coat against a poolside tableau, reinforcing creative director Demna’s ongoing exploration of proportion, displacement, and irony. Accessories like the Le City Basket in raffia and the Carrie Bowling Bag strike a balance between satire and desirability, their practical silhouettes subverted by high-gloss presentation.
What’s clever about this campaign is not just its reappropriation of marketing tropes, but its awareness of fashion’s complicity in selling dreams. By mimicking the aesthetics of five-star leisure—complete with CG sunsets and aspirational slogans—Balenciaga exposes the machinery behind the fantasy while still participating in it. The accompanying still-life imagery takes this further, presenting bags and ski goggles as luxe artifacts suspended in a void, stripped of use but rich in suggestion. If there’s a critique here, it’s subtle: the campaign doesn’t undermine the allure of wealth and leisure, but rather frames it as a hyperreal simulation, glossy and hollow in equal measure.
Balenciaga doesn’t just sell the dream—it sells the billboard about the dream, complete with the Photoshop file left half-open. High Summer 2025 is luxury as performance art: sun-kissed, self-aware, and just a little off.
Photographer | Roe Ethridge