Dear Shaded Viewers,
Balenciaga’s new Heart and Body campaign reads as a considered act of continuity and re‑centering rather than a rupture—a way of opening Pierpaolo Piccioli’s era by expanding the house’s emotional range while preserving the radicality that defined its recent past.
Piccioli frames his first Balenciaga collections, Summer 26 “The Heartbeat” and Fall 26 “Body and Being,” around the idea of a “new community” held together not by homogeneity but by “respect, sensitivity, strength, freedom.” The language is revealing: this is not a manifesto of correction but of dilation, shifting the focus from shock to shared values without disowning the brand’s edge.
The choice of ambassadors—Harris Dickinson, Winona Ryder, Roh Yoonseo—underscores that move from archetype to biography, from meme-able character to “human beings with distinct stories, faces marked by experience, vulnerability, and nuance.” These are not blank canvases onto which a house projects attitude; they are already storied figures whose own filmographies and fan communities become part of Balenciaga’s evolving narrative.
Visually, the campaign replaces the hyper-mediated street or digital arena with a Parisian artist’s atelier, a “suspended, heterotopic space” where time appears paused and identities can be examined with a quieter intensity. The rawness of primed canvas, the rigor of the architecture, and the gridded arrangements of images and video establish a mise-en-scène that is still unmistakably Balenciaga—controlled, graphic, architectural—but now charged with introspection rather than provocation.
David Sims’s portraits at close and further range, combined with direct snapshots and spoken interviews, position the cast less as performers of a look and more as witnesses to their own subjectivity. The looped sonic collage of their answers extends this idea: the campaign becomes a polyphonic chorus of interior voices, a counterpoint to recent years’ emphasis on the meme, the macro shot, the viral stunt.
In the images, men’s and women’s ready-to-wear operates as both structure and release: “modern silhouettes with classic Balenciaga technique, in service to volume and freedom—austerity belied by dynamic lightness.” You can read this as a design philosophy that respects the house’s hard-edged, sculptural DNA while softening its psychological impact on the wearer.
Piccioli’s stated aim—“I want the garments to bring ease and confidence, never to overpower. The person wears the clothing, not the opposite”—is a pointed but not antagonistic rephrasing of the Balenciaga proposition. Where Demna often explored how fashion could function as armor, distortion or social commentary, Piccioli leans into clothing as a facilitator of connection: individuality “forming community,” values “shaping the aesthetic,” rather than the other way around.
Crucially, none of this reads as a disavowal of Demna’s tenure; instead, it feels like a re-routing of his insistence on real people and contemporary narratives through a different emotional register. The cast is still culturally current and cross-disciplinary—actors, a composer, models—echoing Balenciaga’s recent strategy of tapping talent whose relevance lies as much in their online and subcultural resonance as in traditional fame.
Names like Danielle Deadwyler, Havana Rose Liu, Labrinth, Mona Tougaard, Loli Bahia, Ned Sims, and Sen Samysheva reinforce that Balenciaga remains attuned to a younger, cinephile and music-literate audience, one that grew up on both streaming platforms and runway clips. The campaign declines to sensationalize that audience; instead, it invites them into a “paused” space where style is less about performance for the feed and more about the private negotiation between body, fabric, and feeling.
With the Summer 26 collection arriving in select stores and on balenciaga.com, Heart and Body serves as a thesis statement for a Balenciaga that wants to keep its sharp silhouette and cultural voltage while softening its emotional temperature. The pivot is subtle but decisive: away from the spectacle of controversy, towards the spectacle of intimacy.
If Demna’s Balenciaga asked what it means to be visible in an over-exposed world, Piccioli’s opening gesture asks what it means to be truly seen. The answer, for now, is a community assembled in an atelier, clothes that promise “dynamic lightness,” and a house that seems determined to carry its past forward without turning it into an apology.
Later,
Diane
