If the Boycott Was Real, Why is The Brand Is Still Here?
It is 2026 and power is supposedly in our hands. Every celebrity and every corporation walks on eggshells now. We can dismiss, we can destroy, we can take down anything as long as enough of us decide we hate it. By the power invested in us by a smartphone and a social media account, we are told we run this. The consumer is king. The people have spoken. Cancel culture is democracy in its rawest form.
But do we actually have the power we think we have? Or are we foot soldiers in someone else’s war, convinced we are generals?
Pull on that thread and it unravels fast.
In November 2022, Balenciaga released its holiday gift campaign. The images featured children holding teddy bear handbags dressed in bondage inspired accessories. A second campaign placed legal documents referencing a United States Supreme Court ruling on child pornography within the imagery of a high-end product shoot. Within 48 hours the hashtags burnbalenciaga and cancelbalenciaga had accumulated over 300 million views on TikTok alone. Influencers filmed themselves tearing up Balenciaga products. Kim Kardashian, who had been one of the brand’s most powerful ambassadors, issued a public condemnation. The brand’s two flagship stores were vandalised. Demna, the creative director, issued a personal apology. Balenciaga initially filed a $25 million lawsuit against the production company and set designer, then dropped it when the dropping of the lawsuit produced a second wave of fury. The internet had spoken and its verdict was extinction.
Balenciaga’s parent company Kering reported a modest dip in revenue. The brand fell out of the Lyst Index’s top ten for the first time in years. A 4% sales decline was recorded in the fourth quarter of 2022.
By early 2023 Balenciaga had quietly shifted its aesthetic toward classic craftsmanship and away from the provocative irony it had built its identity on. By 2024 it was showing at Haute Couture week. By early 2025 Kim Kardashian had resumed her partnership with the house. Cardi B walked its runway. The internet that had declared its death watched it walk back in through the front door and mostly let it happen.
Three hundred million views. Bags torn apart on camera. Global outrage sustained for weeks. And the brand is still standing, still showing, still selling. So who actually won that war? Companies are ready to deal with threats like all the time, they can make you feel like a victor but in the long run nothing really has changed.
The Kanye West story is different in scale and identical in structure. In October 2022, after weeks of escalating antisemitic statements on social media, including a post in which he wrote that he was going “death con 3 on Jewish people,” Adidas terminated its Yeezy partnership with immediate effect. The decision cost Adidas an estimated 250 million euros in net income for 2022 alone. The brand was sitting on over one billion euros worth of unsold Yeezy stock. The partnership had represented approximately 10% of Adidas’s total annual revenue. Forbes confirmed that the loss of the deal had cost West his billionaire status, dropping his net worth from approximately $2 billion to $400 million. Gap removed Yeezy products from its stores. Balenciaga, which had its own separate partnership with West at the time, severed that simultaneously. By December 2022 West was on a far-right radio show expressing praise for Adolf Hitler. His accounts were suspended. In February the following year he declared himself a Nazi and began selling swastika t-shirts.
The cancel was real. The consequences were real. West lost his financial empire in a matter of weeks and has spent the years since operating from a position of dramatically reduced institutional access.
But here is the question worth asking. Adidas sat on fourteen days of openly antisemitic public statements from its most valuable partner before it moved. The Yeezy line represented $2 billion in annual revenue. An internal Adidas employee named Sarah Camhi published a LinkedIn post during those fourteen days asking publicly why the company had remained silent both internally and externally while its partner was spreading hate speech. The answer was not moral complexity. The answer was money. Adidas moved when the financial and reputational risk of staying exceeded the financial risk of leaving. The public outrage was the variable that changed that calculation. The public did not have power. The public was the pressure that moved the corporation to act in the corporation’s own interest. Those are two different things that we assume are the same, we are so weak that a tiny feeling of power makes us feel better of ourselves, this is selfish and nothing really has changed.
This is the architecture of cancel culture that nobody explains clearly enough. The consumer believes they are wielding a weapon. In most cases they are providing cover for a decision that has already been made on financial grounds, or they are being used as a mechanism to accelerate a decision that powerful interests have already decided they want made. The outrage is real. The people expressing it are genuine. The grievances are legitimate. But the entity that ultimately decides whether the cancellation lands is not the public. It is the money, and the money has its own agenda.
Look at what happens when the cancellation does not serve any powerful financial or political interest. Harvey Weinstein spent decades in the film and fashion industries as an open secret. The behaviour was known. The damage was documented in whisper networks across two continents. Nothing happened until the New York Times and The New Yorker published investigations in October 2017, and even then the institutional response came days after the articles, not years after the behaviour. The same industry that moved within 48 hours to distance itself from Balenciaga had managed Weinstein’s conduct as a background condition of doing business for thirty years. The cancel happened when journalism forced it into the open. The question of why journalism had to force it, when the information had been available to powerful people all along, answers itself.
This is where the fashion industry and cancel culture and political power all occupy the same uncomfortable space.
Rights movements have always been vulnerable to infiltration by agendas that use legitimate grievances as vehicles for outcomes the movement’s own members would not have chosen. The body positivity movement was absorbed by fashion as a marketing strategy. The diversity conversation was used by brands to sell campaigns without changing supply chains. The sustainability movement gave the fashion industry a language for greenwashing that cost less than actual environmental reform. Each of these was a genuine movement with genuine people behind it, and each was identified by the industry as a force that could be managed, co-opted, and eventually redirected.
Cancel culture follows the same logic. It is a genuine expression of collective moral judgement, and it is simultaneously a tool that can be picked up, aimed and deployed by people with resources and reach that the average person does not have. The Balenciaga controversy was seized by conservative media and political figures who used it to advance a broader cultural argument about gender, children and what they described as elite degeneracy. The argument was not wrong about the specific images. But the people making it the loudest had no previous record of concern about the sexualisation of children in fashion, an industry with a long and documented history of placing minors in adult contexts that had never previously produced this level of coordinated outrage. The cause was real. The army behind it had other reasons for being there.
The Kanye West situation produced a different coalition. Jewish organisations, civil rights groups, music industry executives and ordinary people who had encountered antisemitism in their own lives all contributed to the pressure that eventually moved Adidas. But the situation also produced a faction that used West’s statements to argue points about free speech, corporate power and what they described as disproportionate Jewish influence in the entertainment industry, which was itself a restatement of the antisemitic logic that had triggered the controversy in the first place. The same cancellation event was being used by people with opposite intentions simultaneously. The consumer thought they were participating in accountability. Some of them were. Some of them were being used as audience for someone else’s political argument.
This is where fashion becomes a mirror for something much larger. The boycott as a political tool has genuine power when it is organised, sustained and connected to structural demands. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days and was connected to a legal and legislative strategy that changed American law. The campaign to get brands to pay their garment workers during the pandemic, called PayUp, mobilised consumers on social media and recovered approximately $7.5 billion in owed wages for global suppliers. These were movements with a clear target, a clear demand and a clear measure of success. They worked because the power being applied had somewhere specific to land.
The average fashion boycott in 2026 has none of those properties. It has outrage, a hashtag, a trending moment and a resolution that arrives when the next controversy replaces it in the feed. The brand survives. The behaviour that triggered the boycott is not structurally addressed. The people whose genuine moral concern fuelled the movement return to their lives having spent enormous emotional energy on something that produced, at best, a quarterly earnings footnote and a shifted marketing strategy.
So who owns the power?
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on whether the power is organised or ambient. Ambient outrage, the kind that trends for three days and dissipates, is not power. It is weather. Brands have learned to dress warmly and wait it out. Organised pressure, connected to specific demands and maintained past the news cycle, is power. The difference between the two is strategy, and strategy requires leadership, and leadership requires people who are willing to build something that outlasts a single viral moment.
Fashion will always be a political space because clothing has always been a political act. What you wear communicates who you are, who you align with, what you refuse, what you accept. The brands that dress you are not neutral actors. They have financial relationships with political figures, supply chains that run through countries with specific human rights records, advertising strategies that reflect specific ideas about whose body, whose face and whose culture is considered aspirational. Every purchase is a vote cast in a system that would prefer you believed your vote was entirely personal.
The boycott is real. The brand is also real. The question of which one has more power is not answered by the hashtag count. It is answered by the quarterly earnings report, the shareholder meeting, the legislative lobbying budget and the PR strategy that begins at the exact moment the trending topic peaks.
We have more power than we are using and less power than we think we have. Those two things are true at the same time, and understanding the gap between them is the beginning of using what we actually have.
