SUMMER THROUGH A DISTINCTLY BALENCIAGA LENS

As the fashion calendar tilts toward the warmest months, Balenciaga has offered a cinematic recalibration of what “resortwear” can look like in the contemporary luxury context. The maison’s High Summer 2025 campaign isn’t just a collection—it’s a hyper-stylized statement of satire, seduction, and synthetic summer. Captured by American photographer Roe Ethridge, the campaign plays with the conventions of mid-century travel advertising and yuppie-era gloss, reinterpreted through a postmodern, Balenciaga-coded lens. The result is a fashion editorial that is equal parts dream sequence and digital fever dream.

From beachfront opulence to souped-up suburban swimwear, High Summer is a study in duality: irony and earnestness, nostalgia and futurism, highbrow and kitsch. It also unveils several key pieces that are likely to define summer wardrobes—from reengineered jersey dresses to woven raffia accessories and sculptural footwear that bridge digital surrealism with tactile design.

Escaping Escapism: The Art of Roe Ethridge’s Visual Language

Balenciaga’s latest campaign rests in the capable hands of Roe Ethridge, whose previous work for the house includes editorial-style lookbooks and eerie, artificial Americana. With High Summer, Ethridge pushes this tension further, capturing models in serene yet uncanny settings—palm trees gleam unnaturally, sand dunes sparkle like pixels, and the ocean looks too blue to be real. It’s a visual commentary on the manipulated reality of luxury marketing and a reflection of the CGI-enhanced world we now inhabit.

The campaign features both photographic still-lifes and cinematic portraits. Each model, clad in Balenciaga’s razor-cut silhouettes or whimsically oversized garments, poses with a calculated detachment—neither enjoying the beach nor resisting it, but simply existing within the brand’s hyperreal world.

Taglines like “DETOX IN BB,” “LUXURY IS A STATE OF MIND,” and “SUNKISSED, DIGITALLY” flash across visuals in sans-serif text, parodying Instagram culture and digital wellness obsessions while reaffirming the brand’s ironic edge.

Key Pieces: The Return of the Raffia, the Reinvention of the Jersey Dress

One of the standouts of the collection is the Le City Basket, a sculpted raffia handbag with lambskin trim that reimagines Balenciaga’s iconic City bag in a material context historically linked to farmer’s markets and tropical souvenirs. Here, raffia becomes refined, and the use of lambskin elevates the rustic into a wearable oxymoron—vacation-ready yet red carpet-viable.

Other accessories include oversized beach totes featuring Balenciaga’s spray-paint logos, wraparound visors with industrial finishes, and jelly sandals cast in metallic hues—each item playfully straddling the line between parody and posh.

In apparel, the collection is anchored by sleek jersey dresses that recall Y2K club culture—clinging silhouettes with drawstring details and asymmetrical hems. Bikinis with BB-logo buckles nod to archival branding but are styled atop oversized board shorts and beneath slouchy denim jackets, undermining their sex appeal with ironic layering.

Irony Meets Elegance: Balenciaga’s Subversive Resortwear Language

At first glance, High Summer could be mistaken for a straightforward vacation campaign. But Balenciaga, under the direction of Demna, rarely traffics in simplicity. The house’s approach to summer isn’t about retreat or relaxation—it’s about questioning the very nature of those ideals.

In the campaign, the tropes of aspirational summer—sunsets, cocktails, yachts, endless pools—are distorted to expose their theatricality. A woman poses poolside with a crocodile-texture tote that seems to sweat, gleam, and glisten under a digitally enhanced sun. A man sips a neon drink while wearing platform Crocs and a mesh tank top that reads, “PRIVATE ISLAND—IN YOUR MIND.”

This dualism is central to Balenciaga’s aesthetic DNA: the ability to stage a high-fashion moment while simultaneously poking fun at it. It’s luxury for those in on the joke—an elite joke, yes, but one broadcast with clarity.

CGI as Commentary: The Rise of Synthetic Storytelling

While CGI has become a staple in fashion imagery, Balenciaga leverages it not merely for convenience or dazzle but as a conceptual device. The High Summer campaign incorporates 3D animations, subtly shifting ocean tides, blinking sunglasses, and waving palm trees—each one slightly off, creating a sense of unease. This simulated environment mirrors the digitally curated “perfect summer” fed to consumers via social media platforms.

The digitally manipulated images are juxtaposed with still-life photos of melted ice cream cones, crushed soda cans, and half-empty sunscreen bottles—all coated in sand. These are relics of real summer. In a campaign so visually perfect, these grounded elements serve as disruptive artifacts, reminding us of the tactility and imperfection that the digital sphere often eliminates.

The Luxury of Location: Why ‘High Summer’ Goes Nowhere

Interestingly, High Summer never pinpoints an exact location. There is no specific resort town, no recognizable beach, no villa balcony overlooking the Côte d’Azur. This lack of place is deliberate—Balenciaga’s summer is a fiction. The campaign resists groundedness in favor of the generic-yet-idyllic, a design choice that mirrors the homogeneity of influencer travel aesthetics.

By opting out of location specificity, Balenciaga universalizes its satire. These images could be anywhere—or nowhere. The summer vacation becomes less about where you are and more about how you’re seen. It’s a clever nod to how luxury is increasingly marketed as an aesthetic rather than an experience.

Casting and Codes: Inclusive Luxury on Display

The campaign’s cast is refreshingly diverse, from seasoned models to digital influencers. This wide range of faces disrupts the monolithic beauty ideals of past resort campaigns, reflecting fashion’s long-overdue shift toward inclusivity. But this inclusion doesn’t feel performative—it’s folded naturally into the campaign’s larger story.

Some of the models wear headwraps, others have visible tattoos or unconventional body proportions. These details aren’t highlighted as novelties but treated with the same flat affect as the rest of the imagery—another intentional subversion of the “exotic vacation” trope that historically relied on narrow ideals of desirability.

Resortwear Rewritten: Balenciaga’s Larger Narrative

High Summer continues Demna’s ongoing experiment: to test the elasticity of luxury. Just how far can the brand bend the codes of taste, tradition, and trend without snapping the thread of desirability? The answer, it seems, is very far indeed.

Balenciaga doesn’t offer escapism—it offers confrontation. Confrontation with our consumer habits, with our filtered realities, and with the very idea of what “aspirational” even means in a time of planetary crisis, climate anxiety, and performative privilege. By reconfiguring the symbols of luxury—beach bags, bikinis, beach chairs—Demna dares the viewer to question whether fantasy is still a valid currency in fashion.

The Commercial Layer: From Campaign to Checkout

Though conceptually rich, High Summer is also unapologetically commercial. Key pieces from the campaign dropped on Balenciaga’s website within 48 hours of the campaign’s debut. Several raffia bags reportedly sold out in minutes, and the jersey wrap dress has already made appearances on TikTok style roundups and celebrity airport looks.

Balenciaga’s strength lies in this dual ability: to operate at the level of elite critique while still driving sales. While other fashion houses release summer collections rooted in nostalgia or tropical cliché, Balenciaga instead offers a digital hallucination of summer—and the market can’t look away.

Impression

Balenciaga’s High Summer isn’t just another seasonal campaign—it’s a study in how fashion, luxury, and digital culture intersect in the age of spectacle. Through Roe Ethridge’s unnerving visuals and Demna’s razor-sharp concepting, summer is no longer a respite—it’s a reflection. A mirror held up to the ways we construct and consume identity, leisure, and beauty.

There’s irony here, but there’s also truth. And as with all great Balenciaga collections, the viewer is left wondering: Are we in on the joke? Or are we the punchline?

In either case, High Summer proves that luxury isn’t a location—it’s a language. And Balenciaga, once again, is fluent.

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