“I want to apologize for the wrong artistic choice (…) and I take my responsibility,” the Georgian designer, who recently dropped his last name, Gvasalia, for the fashion world, wrote on Instagram on Friday.
“While I sometimes wanted to provoke through my work, I never intended to do so with a subject as horrible as child abuse, which I condemn,” he added.
A master of tease, Demna is in the spotlight for a recent ad campaign for Balenciaga that features two images of girls standing on a sofa and a bed, holding a teddy bear on black, BDSM-inspired straps, or sadomasochistic sexual practices.
In addition, some tweeters observed that, in another photo, there is a bag from a collaboration with Adidas (spring-summer 2023 collection) placed on some documents that read extracts from a US Supreme Court ruling on child pornography.
Regarding this incident, Balenciaga announced at the beginning of the week that he filed an accusation for the inclusion in the campaign of “non-validated documents”, “resulting from irresponsible negligence”.
However, the general director of the luxury house of the Kering group, Cédric Charbit, announced Friday in a statement posted on Instagram that Balenciaga decided not to continue with the litigation.
Charbit also apologized for the incident. According to the New York Post, the lawsuit, filed before the New York court, was directed against the North Six production house and decorator Nicholas Des Jardins, and in it claimed $25 million in damages.
The controversy outraged one of the firm’s muses, businesswoman Kim Kardashian, who stated on Twitter that she was “reassessing” her relationship with the brand.