You’ve probably already seen this Balmain ad with Kendall and Kylie Jenner.
The picture has been all over the Internet including on the instagram pages of both Kendall and Kylie Jenner.
We came across it yesterday and we’ve come across it again today.
It’s from the Balmain Fall campaign and is part of a series of shots featuring famous sisters, including the Hadid girls (Gigi and Bella), as well as Joan Smalls and her sister Erika Smalls.
The aim of the campaign, according to Olivier Rousteing, Balmain’s creative director, is to “highlight the bond between siblings”.
Rousting is quoted as saying “Watching them work together also made clear to me the universality of an age-old truth: the truly powerful strength, support, and love that family members can provide to one another.”
Usually when you think about highlighting the sisterly bond in pictures your vision probably doesn’t have sisters gazing deeply into each other’s eyes with one hovering over the other as if to push her back and mount her. But that’s the beauty of art. Because art is subjective one person can see a picture of two women looking like they’re about to get it on and another can just see a picture of two women in an artistic pose.
We’ve seen comments from people who think the picture looks incestuous. We get how they might see it that way. We all have various different hangups based on our upbringing, cultural practices, beliefs etc. So while some people would never think incest when they see the picture, other people immediately think to themselves that the pose has a sexual connotation, and since Kendall and Kylie are sisters, the picture then strikes them as incestuous.
Other comments we’ve seen open the door for a discussion of the real motivation behind the campaign. Was it just a case of someone giving artistic expression to his fantasies about beautiful young sisters? Who knows? We’re sure the ladies who were privileged to star in the campaign have no complaints. And they all look amazing.
We do have a question about the picture of Kendall and Kylie Jenner though…
We’re thrilled for Kylie that she was able to be part of this campagin; but are we the only ones who don’t recognize her in the picture with her and Kendall? We recognize her just fine in the group picture. But when we first saw the other picture we thought it was Kendall and Kim.
It’s a cute pic. We love all the pictures from the campaign. And we’re all for anything that aims to celebrate the bond between women, whether it’s the bond between sisters or the bond between friends. We think it’s important to encourage women to celebrate each other other and support each other as opposed to aiming to foster jealousy motivated rivalry.