Review of Balenciaga Fall 2021 Ad Campaign Film by Quantic Dream
Balenciaga shares an uncannily beautiful new ad campaign, in the form of a digitally animated short film, for Fall 2021.
Produced by French video-game studio Quantic Dream, which is renowned for its innovative approach to interactive storytelling, the campaign continues creative director Demna Dvasalia’s exploration of cloud-based virtual spaces that began with the Fall 2021 runway show. Featuring a virtual-reality show that digitally rendered its models through motion capture, the show coincided with the launch of a video game called Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, where players could explore a digital fantasy world and wear all of the pieces from the collection.
The new campaign beautifully brings an emotional narrative into this conceptual framework.
Using motion capture to create animated versions of real actors, the film follows two characters that meet at a futuristic facility that provides temporary escapes to virtual scenarios. The protagonists meet in line and instantly form a connection, but are quickly separated and shepherded to their respective VR rigs. They search for each other through the vibrant and varied virtual world (parts of which are drawn from the intricate environments of Afterworld) but are yanked from the simulation before they can fully reunite.
Yet once the headsets are removed, they find each other back in the “real world,” and embrace. As they do, they begin to transform into other digital avatars – perhaps calling into question the physical reality of this first world, or perhaps signaling the universality of love.
Many brands are embracing aspects of virtual reality, motion capture, and 3D rendering, but no one else is doing it with the consistency and thoughtfulness of Balenciaga. Gvasalia is patiently laying the groundwork for a long-term creative and strategic approach, creating both technical and conceptual frameworks to develop new sorts of narrative and interactive experiences.
What’s most exciting to see is the way in which Balenciaga lets these two aspects – the storytelling and the technical medium itself – intertwine. Here, a seemingly simple love story takes on a lot of ethical complexity through the meta-layer of the virtual experience inside a virtual experience. Will we be able to love, or even recognize each other and ourselves when the digital takes the place of the physical? Is the physical the real? What does it mean to live to love when life becomes unrecognizable? Balenciaga is raising delightful, haunting questions, and it seems like this is just the beginning.
Balenciaga Creative Director | Demna Gvasalia
Direction | Quantic Dream
Production | Quantic Dream
Choreography | Ryan Heffington
Music | Nima Fakhrara
3D Scans | Unit Image 3D Production
Animation | The Motion Picture Company