16 Jan 2026
Balenciaga rewrote the rules of fragrance imagery last year with a campaign that looked nothing like traditional perfume advertising. Instead of lush photography or cinematic storytelling, the House turned to British artist Katerina Jebb—known for scanning objects with forensic clarity—to create a visual universe that felt strangely intimate, futuristic and deeply Balenciaga .
The campaign explored the brand’s identity through dualities: precision and poetry, scientific innovation and natural ingredients, past heritage and advanced technology. With Jebb’s industrial-grade scanner as the primary tool, the collection’s ten fragrances appeared like artefacts from a parallel archive—hyper-detailed, cool-toned and suspended in Balenciaga’s signature industrial grey.
Each flacon was scanned as though it were being preserved, its lines captured with clinical accuracy. The fragrances—No Comment, Getaria, Twenty Four Seven, To Be Confirmed, Muscara, Le Dix, 100%, Extra, Cristóbal and Incense Perfumum—floated in the frame like modern relics. Beside them, key ingredients and packaging details were transformed into high-resolution studies of texture and form. It was a campaign that refused seduction in the traditional sense, choosing instead to provoke curiosity through restraint.
The use of the scanner held symbolic meaning. It mirrored the House’s recreation of the original Le Dix flacon from 1947—a bottle located only after a fifteen-year archival search. In Jebb’s images, sketches of the original packaging and advertising materials resurfaced like rediscovered blueprints, grounding the campaign in M. Balenciaga’s legacy while pushing the language of perfume visuals into something starkly contemporary.
Even the videos—documenting the scanning process itself—carried a hypnotic coldness. The flacons slid beneath the machine’s light beam with robotic precision, revealing a tension between artisanal perfumery and technological control. It was a reminder that the House has always lived in contrast: couture heritage sharpened by industrial edges.
Balenciaga’s new fragrance campaign wasn’t soft or romantic. It was clinical, archival, provocative—and that is exactly why it felt so compelling. It captured the House’s olfactive identity with a clarity that matched its fashion: bold, cerebral and unmistakably original.
