As luxury fashion house Balenciaga faces backlash over ad campaigns critics say condone child exploitation, social media users claim a photo shows Russian-born stylist Lotta Volkova wearing a satanic garb while holding two dolls covered in red paint. This is false; the person in the photo is not Volkova, Her agent confirmed, but a runway model for designer Hu Sheguang at China Fashion Week in 2016.
“This is Balenciaga’s lead designer, Lotta Volkova,” reads a widely shared tweet from November 28, 2022. “I said enough. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
Twitter screenshot taken on December 2, 2022
The image spread as controversy engulfed Balenciaga, a French brand owned by the Kering group, over a couple of recent ad campaigns. One showed children carrying teddy bears dressed in what some called bondage gear, while the other showed printouts of a US Supreme Court ruling related to child pornography.
Social media posts implicating Volkova in the campaigns have appeared on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms. The image also appeared in a Substack post by an early promoter of the QAnon movement, which centers on the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that a global cabal of politicians and celebrities sexually abuse, murder and eat children.
But Volkova is not Balenciaga’s top designer, nor is the woman pictured in the photo shared online, her agent told AFP.
“Lotta Volkova has not worked with Balenciaga since 2018, she did not work or have anything to do with Balenciaga’s Christmas/ss23 campaigns,” Julia Hackel said in an email and WhatsApp message. “Lotta was a stylist during her time at Balenciaga until her departure in 2018. She was not a designer.”
Reverse image searches revealed that the photo of the woman with dolls has been online for years; it was featured in a 2016 Daily Mail article, for example. The original caption, posted by Getty Images, says it shows an unidentified model wearing one of Hu’s designs during a China Fashion Week show in Beijing in March 2016.
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AFP captured photos and videos of the same event, including that of the model in question.
“Lotta was not involved in this show in any way,” Hackel said.
Volkova’s Instagram account has reportedly been set to private as social media users criticized her previous posts amid the uproar over Balenciaga ads. But the publicly available photos of the stylist appear different from the woman depicted in the image shared online.
A model parades a creation from the Sheguang Hu Collection designed by Hu Sheguang at the China Fashion Week in Beijing on March 31, 2016 (AFP/STR)
Embed from Getty Images
AFP could not independently verify the identity of the model.
In a Nov. 28 statement about his ad campaigns, which have drawn scrutiny everywhere from TikTok to Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s primetime TV show, Balenciaga said the projects “reflect a number of mistakes for which Balenciaga assumes responsibility”.
“We strongly condemn child abuse; it was never our intention to include it in our narrative,” the company said.
AFP reached out to Balenciaga for additional comment, but there was no response.
Source: news.google.com