A Balenciaga Activewear Campaign on the Transformation Into Power

Balenciaga is a brand built on tension: couture heritage pressed against subcultural and digital-native expression. This project produced a short-form campaign film for the maison’s activewear line, plus the strategy and rollout plan that sits behind it.

I was producer and creative director. Directed by Griffith Long. Cinematography by Michael Mowers. Talent: Paige O'Malley and Elise Elyse McMillion. Shot on location in Savannah—at The River Garage and Wormsloe Historic Site. Developed in SCAD’s LXMT 740 Visual Narrative studio.

Balenciaga activewear competes in a category already saturated with aspirational fitness imagery, and the brand has limited consumer association with the activewear category to begin with. Women already familiar with Balenciaga’s ready-to-wear and accessories tend to question its credibility in performance.

The question was how to make a campaign feel unmistakably Balenciaga, and unmistakably about the woman inside the garments, not the workout.

• Limited brand association of Balenciaga with activewear
• A category saturated with aspirational fitness imagery
• Premium activewear customers default to specialist brands

Position Balenciaga as the innovator inside activewear, not a tourist in it. The campaign weaves a narrative that celebrates the brand’s quality, innovation, and boundary-pushing design — bridging luxury with performance and drawing parallels to the maison’s ready-to-wear vocabulary.

The premise I built the film around: activewear is the moment a woman puts on power and feels it reconfigure her. The clothing is not a uniform for the workout. It is the transformation.

• Position activewear as transformation, not utility
• Honor Balenciaga's couture DNA in a ready-to-perform category
• Avoid the default vocabulary of gym-brand marketing

The mood board paired the brand’s urban, gritty, chic vocabulary with the organic textures of Savannah — industrial bridges, live-oak allées, parking-lot sunsets — and a tight wardrobe palette of black-on-black activewear shapes. Typography (Articulate CF) and an unstoppable / versatile / ambitious tonal triad held the deck together.

These references became the brief for casting, location scouting, wardrobe, and the compositional language carried through to the set.

A 1:14 campaign film built around a single arc: a woman putting on the garments and visibly stepping into a different version of herself.

Produced and creatively directed by me. Directed by Griffith Long, shot by Michael Mowers, with talent Paige O'Malley and Elise Elyse McMillion.

As producer I led scheduling, crew coordination, casting, wardrobe, and the shoot plan across both locations—the industrial geometry of The River Garage and the live-oak allée at Wormsloe.

As creative director I held the treatment, the compositional language, and the through-line—making sure the transformation premise survived the move from deck to set to cut.

The film anchors a four-phase rollout designed to compound earned attention before paid pressure. Each phase hands the audience to the next — video to creator, creator to physical experience, experience to retail.

• Video campaign rollout — 12 Jan – 10 Mar 2025
• Influencer partnership activation — 10 Mar – 09 Aug 2025
• Pop-up experience, NYC — 16 Aug – 09 Sep 2025
• Retail collaboration expansion — 12 Sep – 09 Oct 2025

The film cuts down into a social-native vocabulary: editorial Stories, in-feed teasers, and a creator partnership layer that lives inside Balenciaga’s existing Instagram presence rather than alongside it. The goal was for the campaign to read as an extension of the house, not a paid post.

On Balenciaga.com, the activewear collection takes the homepage hero — the campaign portrait running edge-to-edge above a single Learn More call to action. The web surface is restrained on purpose: the campaign image carries the meaning, the navigation gets out of its way.

Most activewear campaigns shoot the body in motion. This one pointed the camera at the moment before it — the pause, the decision to begin, the garment doing its work on the wearer.