Balenciaga presented its Fall 2021 collection with the video game Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow, and for the campaign relied on Quantic Dream, a Paris-based company that produces and distributes video games founded in 1997. Through a short film made in motion capture, the French fashion house announces and celebrates the arrival of the entire collection in boutiques around the world.

A futuristic, dsitopian, agonizing world of Orwellian memory, where we see this sort of line-up of people arranged in multiple rows waiting their turn to wear a VR. One of them, a man, our protagonist, accidentally bumps into a girl and their gazes cross, it almost seems like lightning.
Once he puts on the VR, the man is catapulted into a virtual reality chock-full of references to the video game Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow – where everyone is wearing Balenciaga’s latest collection – and all he seems to have to do is navigate his way through this sort of calm, organized chaos. However, this does not fully distract him from his real emotions and he sets off in search of that girl he crossed paths with earlier in reality.
He manages to find her but just as they are about to kiss the simulation ends bringing them back to the sad truth/reality.
Once in the real world, however, the two protagonists find each other, embrace and finally kiss as well as all the other characters met during the short film.
Live to Love, this is the claim that we see at the very end of the video – and which was also the one of last year’s campaign which you can read about here – and which celebrates the primal force that “moves the sun and the other stars”, as the poet wrote, love.

Below you can take a look at the Balenciaga Fall 2021 campaign available online and in the fashion house’s boutiques worldwide.