This week, BFRND released Elephant, Balenciaga’s Summer 2023 original soundtrack in collaboration With German rapper UFO361 and producer SONUS030. The inspiration for the soundtrack comes from the idea of having to fight to be who you are and the trio wanted to produce music that gives strength to their audience, something that you can listen to while walking in the street with the feeling of being indestructible, that nothing in this world can stop you from being who you are. The expression “The elephant in the room” is a metaphorical idiom for an important or enormous topic, question or controversial issue that is obvious or that everyone knows about, but no one mentions or wants to discuss because it makes at least some of them uncomfortable and is personally, socially, or politically embarrassing, controversial, inflammatory, or dangerous. The term is often used to describe an issue that involves a social taboo, which generates disagreement, such as race, religion, politics or sexuality. It is applicable when a subject is emotionally charged; and the people who might have spoken up decide that it is probably best avoided. The artwork for this LP has been fully generated with Dall-e 2, a text-to-image artificial Intelligence developed by Open AI. Streaming everywhere now.
Watch CLONES: Balenciaga's Spring '22 Runway Presentation
Balenciaga’s Spring 22 presentation considers our shifting senses of reality through the lens of technology. We see our world through a filter—perfected, polished, conformed, photoshopped. We no longer decipher between unedited and altered, genuine and counterfeit, tangible and conceptual, fact and fiction, fake and deepfake. Technology creates alternate realities and identities, a world of digital clones.
To illustrate this concept, every look in the Spring 22 collection is seen on Eliza Douglas, an artist who has either opened or closed every show and appeared in most campaigns for the past several years. In a video directed by Quentin Deronzier, Eliza appears as a series of digital clones, some of which are deepfakes, or models with Eliza’s photogrammetry-captured and CG-scanned face digitally grafted on.
Some looks are styled to illustrate artificial manipulation using props, like chainmail headpieces in silver, gold, chrome, and rusted metal. The models march down a minimalist runway to a sci-fi-inspired soundtrack composed by BFRND and an AI voiceover reciting the lyrics of “La Vie En Rose.” The video’s post-production processes include planar tracking, rotoscoping, machine learning, and 3D modeling, implemented in order to achieve a hyper-realistic effect.