No Shock. Just Faces.
There’s a moment in the new Balenciaga campaign where you realise nothing is trying to unsettle you. No provocation. No layered cultural reference demanding to be decoded. Just a person, in a garment, looking more or less like themselves.
That’s a stranger experience than it sounds, coming from this house.
Shot by David Sims, a photographer who has long understood that restraint can carry its own authority, the new Balenciaga campaign introduces Piccioli’s first ambassadors and Friends of the House, set against his Summer 26 collection, The Heartbeat, and Fall 26, Body and Being. You could read this as a casting announcement. Piccioli would probably resist that reduction.
He has spoken about choosing “individuals, not characters.” It reads like a quiet rebuke to everything that came before, though he never frames it that bluntly
The Weight Winona Ryder Carries (And Doesn’t)
Balenciaga made its recent name on image control. Campaigns that felt like provocations. Fashion engineered to be discussed, dissected, occasionally deplored. The friction was deliberate.
Piccioli moves in the opposite direction, and the casting is where you feel it most.
Harris Dickinson appears as himself, which sounds obvious until you remember how rarely that happens in luxury fashion. Winona Ryder is the most interesting choice here. She carries decades of cultural mythology, the kind that usually gets amplified or ironised in fashion imagery. Here, it is simply present. Not exaggerated. Not mined for nostalgia. That restraint feels confident, but it is also a risk. When you refuse to heighten the drama, you give the audience less to react to.
Roh Yoonseo brings a quiet magnetism that needs little translation if you have paid attention to Korean screen culture in recent years. Danielle Deadwyler, Havana Rose Liu, Labrinth, Mona Tougaard and the others form a circle that feels genuinely cross-generational and cross-disciplinary. However, it would be naïve to pretend the diversity here is accidental. Luxury does not stumble into representation. It stages it. The question is whether staging automatically cancels sincerity.
The new Balenciaga campaign does not resolve that tension. Perhaps it should not. Community at this level is always partly constructed. The test is whether it begins to feel lived rather than arranged.
Audiences fluent in branding mechanics will notice the difference.
Fashion Fatigue Is Real, and Luxury Knows It
The past decade of luxury asked the same question repeatedly: how loud can we go? Viral moments. Borrowed internet humour. Spectacle calibrated for the algorithm. It worked, until the audiences who made it work began to tire of being treated like reaction machines.
In Singapore, that fatigue runs particularly deep. Fashion consumers here are globally connected, often extensively travelled, and quick to recognise when a brand is performing relevance rather than earning it. Shock has a short half-life in a market that consumes culture at speed.
There is no dramatic renunciation of the Demna era here. No public break. No ceremonial reset. The quietness functions as a signal, though not everyone will read it that way. Some will see maturity. Others may see caution. In a house that built recent momentum on disruption, restraint can look either intentional or tentative. It depends on how much patience you are willing to grant.
Sims’ photography holds that mood carefully. The garments have volume. The Balenciaga technical signature is visible. Yet nothing appears to be performing. The clothes sit on bodies rather than overwhelming them. Piccioli has been direct about this: clothing should bring ease and confidence, not consume the person wearing it. That position is philosophical as much as aesthetic.
Sincerity does not travel the way provocation does. It moves more slowly. It also leaves less room for irony, which means it has less protection if audiences decide they are unconvinced.
What “The Heartbeat” Actually Asks
Naming Summer 26 The Heartbeat and Fall 26 Body and Being is not neutral language. It positions the collections, and by extension the campaign, as meditations on presence rather than image. What does it mean for a fashion house to speak about the body without turning it into a spectacle? What does belonging look like when it is built around values instead of aesthetics?
These questions form the brief.
In Singapore’s achievement-oriented culture, where identity is layered across professional, social, and digital spaces, the idea that a luxury brand might prioritise the person over the constructed image touches something recognisable. Not everyone will respond to it. Some will find it overly earnest. But community in this framing is not about sameness. It is about recognition. Being seen without the armour on.
That is a more vulnerable positioning than Balenciaga has attempted in a long time.
Cultural Capital Takes Longer to Rebuild Than to Lose
Balenciaga’s cultural position became more fragile than it once seemed. Rebuilding it is slower and less cinematic, and it rarely feels heroic while it is happening. Most resets are dull before they are vindicated.
The new Balenciaga campaign reflects that reality. There is no attempt to rewrite history. No conspicuous apology. No pivot so sharp it risks looking panicked. Just a signal of direction.
The Summer 26 collection landed in select stores and online from 17 February. The commercial launch matters, but the more consequential question is ideological. Can a house that was built recently on disruption sustain one built on sincerity? Can Piccioli’s instinct, which values what should shape aesthetics rather than follow them, hold in a culture that oscillates between craving connection and recoiling from anything that feels too earnest?
The campaign does not answer those questions. It makes the bet visible.
Previously, Balenciaga dared fashion to keep up with how extreme it could get. This version asks something quieter: whether a house can make you feel something without making you flinch.
That is a different kind of ambition. Harder to measure. Slower to pay off. Far less spectacular in the short term. It may fail quietly. It may also prove more durable than anything a viral moment ever built. We simply will not know which for a while.