Image shows China Fashion Week model, not Balenciaga designer

"This is the Chief Designer for Balenciaga, Lotta Volkova," says a widely shared November 28, 2022 tweet. "Enough said. They knew exactly what they were doing."

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Screenshot from Twitter taken December 2, 2022

The image spread as controversy engulfed Balenciaga, a French brand owned by the Kering group, over a pair of recent ad campaigns. One featured children carrying teddy bears dressed in what some called bondage gear, while the other showed printed documents from a US Supreme Court ruling related to child pornography.

Social media posts implicating Volkova in the campaigns have cropped up across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other platforms. The image was also featured in a Substack post from one of the earliest promoters of the QAnon movement, which centers on the baseless conspiracy theory that a global cabal of politicians and celebrities sexually abuse, murder and eat children.

But Volkova is not Balenciaga’s top designer -- nor is she the woman depicted in the photo shared online, her agent told AFP.

"Lotta Volkova has not worked with Balenciaga since 2018, she did not work on nor have anything to do with the Balenciaga holiday/ss23 campaigns," said Julia Hackel in an email and WhatsApp message. "Lotta was a stylist during her time at Balenciaga until her departure in 2018. She was not a designer."

Reverse image searches revealed the photo of the woman with dolls has been online for years; it appeared in a 2016 article from the Daily Mail, for example. The caption on the original photo, published by Getty Images, says it shows an unidentified model wearing one of Hu's designs during a China Fashion Week show in Beijing in March 2016.

AFP captured photos and videos from the same event -- including of the model in question.

"Lotta was not involved in this show in any way," Hackel said.

Volkova's Instagram account was reportedly set to private as social media users criticized her past posts amid the uproar over Balenciaga's ads. But publicly available photos of the stylist appear different from the woman depicted in the image shared online.

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A model parading a creation from the Sheguang Hu Collection designed by Hu Sheguang at China Fashion Week in Beijing on March 31, 2016 ( AFP / STR)

Embed from Getty Images

 

AFP was unable to independently verify the identity of the model.

In a November 28 statement about its ad campaigns -- which drew scrutiny everywhere from TikTok to Fox News host Tucker Carlson's primetime TV show -- Balenciaga said the projects "reflect a series of grievous errors for which Balenciaga takes responsibility."

"We strongly condemn child abuse; it was never our intent to include it in our narrative," the company said.

AFP reached out to Balenciaga for additional comment, but no response was forthcoming.