Kim Kardashian defends reaction to Balenciaga scandal: Details

Standing on my own Kim Kardashian spoke about the controversial Balenciaga campaign in which children posed with BDSM-inspired stuffed animals and defended against the backlash that she didn’t react quickly enough.

“In the case of Balenciaga, everyone is like: “Why are you silent?? And I thought, “Wait, I’m not in this campaign, I don’t know what’s going on. Let me take a minute to research this,” Kardashian, 42, said on the Monday, Dec. 26 episode of “Angie Martinez IRLpodcast. “And once I saw what everyone sees on the Internet and the reality of the situation, I fully spoke out and expressed my thoughts about child pornography. I totally condemned it.”

In Balenciaga’s promotion for their Spring/Summer 2023 collection, which released on November 16, two young girls held purses that were designed to look like teddy bears in BDSM-inspired looks, surrounded by Balenciaga products, including clothing and homewares. Other images that did not include children showed a purse lying on top of a pile of files and documents that turned out to include an excerpt from a Supreme Court case on child pornography.

The SKKN by Kim founder first came under fire after she posed for the label without commenting on a photo shoot later that month. Kardashian the star has collaborated with the Spanish fashion house many times, appearing in advertising campaigns and wearing the label at the Met Gala in May.

Two weeks later Selfish the author took to social media to respond to the controversial images.

“The last few days I have been silent, not because I was not shocked and outraged by the recent Balenciaga campaigns,” she wrote on Twitter at the time. “But because I wanted to talk to their team to understand for myself how this could happen.”

She continued, “As a mother of four, I was shocked by the disturbing images. The safety of children should be treated with the utmost care, and any attempt to normalize child abuse of any kind should have no place in our society—period. I appreciate Balenciaga’s removal of ad campaigns and apology. By talking to them, I believe they understand the seriousness of the problem and will take the necessary steps to ensure this never happens again.”

On Monday, Kardashian, who shares children North, 9, Saint, 7, Chicago, 4, and Psalm, 3, with her ex-husband. Kanye West explained it because she didn’t say “Fuck you, Balenciaga” and that’s all, people were “angry” at her reaction to the scandal. “It’s like they get mad if I don’t speak up, they get mad if I speak up and I don’t cancel [the brand]. They are just crazy.”

While the founder of KKW Beauty said that “life is all about making mistakes” and “growing and evolving and getting better,” she added that underage “have no place” in BDSM-themed art and “everything what is related to the sexualization of children” should not be “in our brains or in our society”.

However, Kardashian insisted she “couldn’t be clearer” when she initially denounced the campaign and that advertising was both “terrifying” and “disturbing”.

“But if they don’t hear what they wanted to hear, it will be like, ‘Fuck you, you got canceled,’” she said.