GROSS: Balenciaga parent company CEO owns auction site selling sexually explicit child mannequins

After Balenciaga received backlash for a questionable ad campaign, online commenters found even more strange connections involving the luxury brand's parent company, Kering.

GROSS: Balenciaga parent company CEO owns auction site selling sexually explicit child mannequins
AP Photo/Christophe Ena
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The deeper down the Balenciaga rabbit hole you go, the darker it gets.

After controversially featuring toddlers holding BDSM-inspired teddy bear purses in a recent ad campaign, the brand’s parent company, Kering, is taking heat because its CEO owns an auction site that sells child sex mannequins.

In a Tweet, conservative commentator Morgan Ariel shows examples of some of the disturbing art the site Christie's sells, including a piece called “F*CKFACE, a mannequin of a child with a penis for a nose and a butthole for a mouth.

Although some people don’t think Kering's CEO, François-Henri Pinault, is to blame for his auction site selling pedophilic art, because, as Newsweek writes, “there is no evidence to suggest that Pinault would have had any input on the works in question,” many Twitter users disagree:

The art, by Jake and Dinos Chapman, which sold for $189,610.04 CAD, somehow did not violate Instagram’s terms of service, and was posted on their now-deleted Instagram account, garnering over 1,000 likes.

According to Newsweek, the artists became popular in the 1990s for their provocative and sexually explicit work, including a pornographic film starring an “actress having sex with the severed head of an adult male mannequin,” which sold for over $1,300 in 2001.

Kering is the parent company to several luxury brands, including, Balenciaga, Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Boucheron, Bottega Veneta, Alexander McQueen, Puma, Brioni and more.

François-Henri Pinault, who is married to Salma Hayak, has not yet responded to the controversy surrounding his auction site’s exploitative for-sale items.

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