Balenciaga’s Bizarre Instagram Account, Explained | GQ

Last May, Balenciaga began posting some really weird Instagrams. Actually, by Instagram standards, they were just bad—not merely strange, but almost triumphantly unflattering, which on Instagram, is about as bad as you can get. First, they shared a photo of a rail-thin person peeking out from behind a pillow, around which they’d wrapped their leg. In the foreground, their athletic sock-encased foot slipped into a white Balenciaga knife-spike stiletto. The person is holding a light; a white cord dangles just in the frame. It looks like a selfie someone took by accident and hopes no one else ever sees, let alone one they’d blast out to 8.7 million Instagram followers. The next day, more of the same: a pale Northern European club kid type with a neon green T-shirt wrapped around her head and a plaid Balenciaga button-down on her chest, gazing at the camera with the kind of blank stare that would drive you off Tinder for weeks. Sometimes the photos don’t even have people in them. Sometimes they aren’t in focus. There is never any caption, any tags, any link to buy. You probably won’t recognize a single person in the photographs, unless you make a habit of going to Lucien in New York’s East Village or rolling your eyes at people who still go to Berghain in Berlin. There is no information about the pieces the person is wearing or the collections they come from. And since May 2018, the account has basically posted nothing else: it’s a flood of bad Instagrams with no context.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has made some of their followers really mad. Some are simply angry at the quality of the images being promoted by a luxury fashion brand: “This is someone tried to be cool and edge without any talent left,” said @iamgao on a blurry photograph of a Balenciaga bag hanging from a scaffold in what appears to be New York City. “Mental hospital patients been missing and I finally found out that the Balenciaga has kidnapped all of em to be as third models LOL,” wrote @kariessmen on a shot of a guy reclining in bed with the house’s over-the-knee green boots wrapped around his neck like a scarf. Others are aghast imagining what house founder Cristobal Balenciaga would make of this new direction: “Sad and disrespectful what the younger hires have brought the name of Balenciaga to,” wrote @juanantoniopisonero on a disposable camera image of a guy in a denim vest. These Instagrams, the old heads seem to believe, are a threat to the very concept of luxury fashion itself.

Not everyone hates it, though. “Only intellectuals can appreciate this account,” wrote @chandler_sparks on a chopped and screwed image of a woman’s head. Often, people will just post, “Best meme page”—or, on images which are in focus or the person’s face is actually visible: “Finally, a normal post from Balenciaga.”