the balenciaga studies: one brand three lenses- focused on society, culture, and fashion imagery
Three projects, one brand, three completely different lenses. The research presentation asked what Balenciaga means culturally and why the conversation around luxury identity shifts every time they put something out. The image project got physical, shooting and constructing a visual world that lived inside the brand's aesthetic. The zine pushed that further into asking not what Balenciaga is, but where it's going. Looking at them together, they trace a line from analysis to interpretation to imagination, and I think that progression says a lot about how I work best. I don't just want to understand something, I want to get inside it.
fashion Images
This project was a multi-page document built around a brand analysis of Balenciaga, moving through a moodboard, a photographic task, and a hand-constructed fragrance campaign. I styled and shot myself on the streets of London, using the city's architecture to mirror how the brand shoots their own lookbooks.
Trajectory was a full-production zine built around the question of where Balenciaga is heading. My concept was post-apocalyptic dystopia, sandy, worn, Mad Max-adjacent, as the logical next step. Following the brand's arc from its beige couture origins through to its current AI-era of futurism, I built Trajectory. From concept, casting, designing, creating, and styling, two photoshoots were conducted and used as an anchor for my physical construction of the zine. The physical zine was coffee-stained, hand-burned, and sealed in a time capsule tin. Committing fully to an idea from genesis to product taught me about creative direction, and how having all the necessary tools and ideas to create the product you’re striving to achieve is most important.
The fragrance campaign was the piece I'm most proud of. Balenciaga hasn't released a fragrance since 2015, so I reimagined what one would look like today, building the image entirely from scratch using sourced materials, hand-drawn elements, and Photoshop as my primary editing tool. It taught me that to replicate a brand's energy convincingly, you have to understand it deeply first.
fashion society and culture
