Balenciaga launches its Christmas gift campaign

As it does every year, Balenciaga is making its way into our homes during the holiday season, but this time in a rather special way. Its end-of-year gifting campaign puts hands center stage: long, exaggerated nails that grab bags, boots, and accessories as if they were weapons of mass seduction. Marie Valognes photographs everything with an almost clinical eye, as if the real luxury lay in the hands that carry them and not in the maison’s objects of desire.

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The idea is simple and brilliant: showcase products through the kind of nail art you only do when you know someone is going to see you opening an expensive gift. Nails with mini bags hanging from them holding a Rodeo Bag in soft leather or rhinestones; silver nails like gift ribbons contrasting with lacquered pumps; Christmas sweater nails caressing a Le City in lambskin; candy cane nails playing with charms, keys, and small accessories that turn any bag into a personalized mood. The hands seem like characters in their own right within the campaign.

The charms are an important part of the game: a miniature Alaska boot, a souvenir Eiffel Tower, a hotel key ring, a crystallized gift bow, and Balenciaga Beads. They add that touch between ironic and ultra-identity that turns any bag into an internal message for those who know how to look. And all around, gifts are scattered as if the party had started early: Opera leather gloves, silver combs and clips, a metal cup with a straw, a leather passport, perfumes from the new collection…

Everything is staged so that it doesn’t look like a perfect set, but rather a Christmas chaos created by someone with great taste and no time to tidy up. The aesthetic is maximalist, kitsch, but done with the visual intelligence that Balenciaga masters: the contrast between the absurd, the expensive, and the everyday. Demna understands that real Christmas isn’t Pinterest-perfect: it’s impossible nails, torn wrapping paper, expensive gifts mixed with half-eaten cookies. And he’s turned it into a campaign.

The new Balenciaga Gifts category is now available in select stores and at balenciaga.com, for anyone who wants to give a gift that says, “Yes, I went too far, but you’re going to love it.”