Balenciaga Bel Air Bag Fall 2024 Ad Campaign

Review of Balenciaga Bel Air Bag Fall 2024 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Demna and Photographer Nadav Kander with models Isabelle Huppert, Michelle Yeoh, and Naomi Watts

Balenciaga continues its exploration of distinctive women and the bags they carry with a Fall 2024 campaign for its new Bel Air bag. The imagery was lensed by photographer Nadav Kander.

The campaign picks up the same visual thread from the house’s recent “The Characters” campaign, featuring minimal yet idiosyncratic portraits of three iconic, talented women: this time, Michelle Yeoh, Isabelle Huppert, and Naomi Watts. Each character poses with the Bel Air bag, the seemingly classic visual approach disrupted by their atypical postures, bold glares into the camera, and the quirky styling and hair choices.

The accompanying short film breaks the fourth wall with a “behind-the-scenes” moment of Isabelle Huppert’s shoot. Followed by a single steadily rotating camera shot, she gets up from the seat and buzzes around the studio space before eventually ending right back up where she started. Instead of a soundtrack, a recording of the star leaving a voicemail furthers the atmosphere of uncanny, self-aware cool.

As is standard practice for Balenciaga now, this latest campaign series has taken over its Instagram, with all other posts hidden. While at first this move seemed a bit confusing, as the brand was potentially sacrificing engagement, interactivity, and an overarching creative narrative, enough repetition of the move has made it feel, in a way, like a distinctive and powerful digital marketing move. There is already so much content out there and the face of the internet changes so quickly; by having just a small and focused set of imagery that rotates each week or so, the brand can cut through the noise and drive attention for a tight product curation.