Submitted by YKONEAgency IPI Score 84/100

Balenciaga Le Dix Launch

Influencer Marketing

YKONE activated 16 macro and celebrity-tier creators across four markets to reintroduce Balenciaga to fragrance for the first time in nearly 80 years, generating 61.9M impressions on Instagram.

36.5MReach
61.9MImpressions
155KInteractions

About the campaign

Balenciaga had been absent from fragrance for nearly 80 years when Kering Beauty, working with the house's archivists, recovered an original 1947 Le Dix bottle and used its silhouette as the template for a ten-scent relaunch collection announced in September 2025. Reintroducing the category to a fashion-first audience across four culturally distinct markets, the US, France, Italy, and the Middle East, without fragmenting the house's visual identity, and doing so in the wake of the brand's damaging 2022 advertising controversy, demanded tight creative control.

YKONE's answer was to concentrate artistic direction, creative guidelines, talent casting, and paid amplification at agency level so that every influencer post read as a Balenciaga fashion editorial rather than a lifestyle product plug. The agency activated 16 macro and celebrity-tier creators, including Anastasia Karanikolaou in the US, Karen Wazen in the Middle East, Alexa Chung, and Valentina Marzullo in Italy, who published 91 Instagram posts centred on the Le Dix fragrances through late 2025.

A physical anchor came with the opening of Balenciaga's first dedicated beauty corner at La Samaritaine in Paris, where YKONE curated organic and paid guest lists to give the collection the sensory dimension social content cannot supply.

YKONE reports 61.9 million impressions, 36.5 million reach, 155,000 interactions, and a 0.4 percent engagement rate, all self-reported figures.

Case in 60 seconds

Balenciaga had been absent from fragrance for nearly 80 years and needed to reintroduce the category to a global fashion audience across four culturally distinct markets — US, France, Italy, and the Middle East — without fragmenting the house's visual identity across ten distinct scent profiles.

Kering Beauty, established in 2023 to develop fragrance and beauty across the group's houses, recovered an original 1947 Le Dix bottle to inform the new collection's design, signalling that the relaunch required equal weight on archival heritage and contemporary luxury codes to land credibly with a fashion-first audience.

Concentrate creative control at agency level — covering artistic direction, creative guidelines, talent casting, and paid amplification — so that each market's influencer content read as a Balenciaga fashion editorial rather than a lifestyle product post, anchored by a physical retail moment at La Samaritaine in Paris to give the collection a sensory dimension social content alone could not supply.

YKONE activated 16 macro and celebrity-tier creators — including Anastasia Karanikolaou (US), Karen Wazen (Middle East), Alexa Chung, Valentina Marzullo (Italy), and others — each publishing premium Instagram posts centred on the six Le Dix fragrances, alongside curated organic and paid guest-list attendance at the La Samaritaine beauty-corner opening.

The campaign generated 61.9M impressions, 36.5M reach, and 155K interactions across 91 posts from 16 creators. All figures are self-reported by YKONE and have not been independently verified.

Strategy Breakdown

The primary strategy-learning section — interpretation, not a press-release summary.

Macro and celebrity-tier influencer audiences in four markets with distinct luxury fragrance cultures: the US, France, Italy, and the Middle East. The campaign targeted Balenciaga's existing fashion audience rather than a general fragrance consumer, reflecting the house's positioning.
Balenciaga's re-entry into fragrance followed a significant reputational crisis: a controversial advertising campaign involving imagery of children caused substantial damage to the brand, prompting Kering to establish a group-level brand safety function. The Le Dix launch therefore carried extra weight as a vehicle for reconnecting the house with audiences through a culturally positive and heritage-grounded moment.
Fragrance is an inherently sensory category that social media content cannot fully communicate. Introducing six distinct scent profiles within a single collection risked fragmenting the campaign's visual coherence, while the archival story of the original Le Dix had to be communicated alongside contemporary relevance.
Balenciaga acted as creative authority, YKONE's reported scope included artistic direction and creative guidelines, meaning the brand's visual standards governed every influencer post rather than individual creator aesthetics. The house's return to fragrance was positioned as a meaningful archival act, with Kering Beauty working with Balenciaga archivists to recover the original bottle and use its silhouette as the template for refillable flacons.
Premium lifestyle creators in the luxury segment attend and document curated events as a natural content behaviour. By anchoring the digital campaign to a physical retail opening at La Samaritaine, the campaign generated a content occasion that extended reach without requiring additional paid media investment for the event strand. Concentrating all activity on Instagram, where luxury fragrance audiences already index, kept the campaign aligned with established audience behaviour in the category.

Creative & Execution System

Assets & channels

  • Instagram posts (91 total, all influencer content)
  • La Samaritaine retail activation — Balenciaga's first dedicated beauty corner, Paris
  • Paid amplification on Instagram (scope reported by YKONE; no spend figures disclosed)

Partners

  • YKONE — lead agency (self-reported; artistic direction, creative guidelines, influencer casting, campaign management, paid amplification strategy, event guest-list curation)

Participation mechanic

  • Influencer attendance and content creation at La Samaritaine retail opening
  • Organic and paid Instagram posts by 16 macro and celebrity-tier creators, each centred on the Le Dix fragrances
  • Paid guest-list curation for the La Samaritaine event

Creator role

  • Macro and celebrity-tier talent acting as brand collaborators with creative guidelines set by the agency rather than individual lifestyle framing
  • Named creators included Anastasia Karanikolaou (US), Karen Wazen (Middle East), Alexa Chung, Valentina Marzullo (Italy), Ines Camilia Tazi, Laila Abdallah, Grace Murphy, and Dima Sheikhly, among others, per the YKONE portfolio page

Results & Evidence

MetricValueResult type
Total impressions61.9MReach / Awareness
Total reach36.5MReach / Awareness
Total interactions155KEngagement

Why YKONE's strategy worked

  1. 1

    Centralising creative control at agency level — covering artistic direction and content guidelines alongside talent selection — appears to produce more visually consistent output across a multi-creator, multi-market campaign than talent-led briefs, which is particularly important for a luxury house with a defined visual identity. This is the model YKONE reports applying to the Le Dix activation.

  2. 2

    Matching talent geography to market cultural context — US, European, and Middle Eastern creators each addressing their own audiences — addressed the challenge of communicating a Paris-originating luxury fragrance across four distinct cultural relationships with the category, per YKONE's reported casting approach.

  3. 3

    Anchoring a digital influencer campaign to a curated physical retail event gives luxury fragrance a sensory dimension that Instagram content cannot supply alone. The La Samaritaine beauty-corner opening functioned simultaneously as a content occasion for creators and a direct consumer touchpoint, extending the campaign's reach without requiring additional paid spend for the event strand.

  4. 4

    Concentrating all influencer activity on Instagram, where premium visual content in the luxury segment performs at predictably lower but high-value engagement rates, kept the campaign aligned with where Balenciaga's fashion audience already lives. The reported engagement rate at 61.9M impressions illustrates the awareness-versus-engagement trade-off inherent in macro and celebrity-tier strategies, which may be appropriate for a category re-entry launch where breadth of awareness is the primary objective.

  5. 5

    For a brand returning to a category after nearly 80 years, the archival product story — recovery of the original 1947 bottle, its silhouette used as the template for refillable flacons — provided influencers with a narrative that premium lifestyle audiences find credible and shareable, rather than requiring the brand to compete on standard fragrance category codes.

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