Funk Without Power: Rabanne’s Rio Campaign and the Cost of Aesthetic Celebration

Beneath the patchworked hillsides of Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian funk erupts from alleyways and rooftop speakers—a sound rooted in the complexities of the urban periphery. These neighborhoods, known as favelas, take their name from a resilient wildflower that once blanketed the hills of Bahia, where soldiers settled after the Canudos War. Like the flower, funk grew from inhospitable soil—improvised, persistent, defiantly alive. Today, what began as the soundtrack of marginal life pulses through luxury speakers and fashion week afterparties. Funk, once criminalized, is now couture.

Paco Rabanne’s recent High Summer 2025 campaign, titled Atlantic Allusions, presents itself as a tribute to Rio’s funk culture. Under the creative direction of Julien Dossena, the French luxury brand cast dancers, DJs, and models from Rocinha—the largest favela in Brazil—and enlisted visual artist Melissa de Oliveira, whose work captures life in the Morro do Dendê, as one of its inspirations.

At first glance, the campaign is a milestone. It brings together high fashion and peripheral culture, style and struggle, visual allure and musical defiance. But beneath the metallic sheen lies a thorny question—one that echoes beyond this campaign and into the heart of the global creative industry:

What does it mean to celebrate a culture without sharing the power to define it?

The Beat Goes Global—But the Power Stays Remote

Rabanne’s visuals are arresting: passinho dancers in alleyways, golden glints of jewelry echoing the brand’s legacy, motorbike rides through narrow streets, the sensual tension of favela funk aesthetics rendered with cinematic finesse. The campaign’s message is clear: the periphery is not just relevant—it’s aspirational.

But aspiration, when filtered through the lens of fashion capitalism, is a complicated currency. The very bodies that animate this campaign—young, Black, peripheral—are still largely excluded from creative command. Melissa de Oliveira, whose photography served as a major visual cue, is cited as “inspiration,” not credited as co-director. Of the over 70 people involved in the shoot, only five were named in the campaign’s social media posts. And none of those five had direct ties to funk culture.

Critics from within the community were quick to raise concerns. One comment that resonated widely captured the contradiction with brutal clarity: “Every time the favela becomes a trend, someone else profits more from it than those who actually live that reality.” Another post described the campaign not as homage, but as “well-packaged appropriation.” These statements speak not only to the imbalance of visibility and power but also to a deeper fatigue—a sense that cultural extraction has become habitual, even predictable.

The Favela Is Not a Backdrop

This is perhaps the most vital point often missed by well-meaning creative teams: the favela is not just a backdrop, and funk is not just an aesthetic. Peripheral culture is body, language, politics. To borrow its codes—its gestures, rhythms, and textures—without crediting the people who authored them is not celebration. It is erasure masquerading as admiration.

The campaign may have had an attentive eye. It may even have gone further than most. But as @carolbberto so sharply puts it, “it continues to lack the basic question: Who are the people behind the codes that inspire the world?”

This is not about rejecting creative freedom or global admiration. It’s about balance. It’s about asking who gets to lead, not just appear.

From Appropriation to Aesthetic Gentrification

This isn’t simply a matter of cultural appropriation—a term worn thin from overuse. What we’re witnessing is what some cultural theorists now call aesthetic gentrification: the process by which marginalized styles are decontextualized and elevated as luxury, while the social realities that shaped them remain ignored.

Funk, once dismissed as vulgar or criminal, is now a visual asset. Its beats are sampled by Beyoncé and Kanye West. Its dancers appear in perfume campaigns. Yet the funk artist—the funkeiro—is still profiled by police, denied institutional support, and killed in alarming numbers during state interventions.

In São Paulo, the deaths of children and adolescents during police operations in favelas have increased by 120% between 2022 and 2024. Black youth are 3.7 times more likely to be victims in these interventions. The Massacre of Paraisópolis, in which nine teens died during a police raid at a baile funk, remains a haunting scar—one that glamour can’t cover up.

In this light, fashion campaigns that dip into funk aesthetics without grappling with this brutality risk transforming pain into palette. They beautify a culture without acknowledging that the people who produce it are still, in many cases, fighting for survival.

Inclusion Is Not the Same as Co-authorship

It’s important to acknowledge Rabanne’s efforts. Unlike many global campaigns, this one did involve real community members. Dancers from Rocinha. DJs like Aisha and DJ Guiguinho. Even some authentic funk tracks made it to the final cut. That matters. Representation matters.

But inclusion in the cast is not the same as co-authorship. Visibility is not agency.

For a campaign truly rooted in the culture it celebrates, the people behind the camera matter as much as those in front of it. Who wrote the narrative? Who decided the color palette? Who shaped the story arc? If the answer is still predominantly white, European, and distant from the lived reality of funk, then the campaign—however well-produced—remains performative.

Couture in the Canyon of Inequality

There is a deeper absurdity at work—one so blatant it often slips beneath the shine of campaign lighting: the sheer disconnect between the world being photographed and the world doing the photographing.

Rabanne, like most luxury fashion houses, operates at price points that are galaxies away from the economic realities of the communities it now claims to celebrate. A sequined Rabanne dress can cost upwards of €1,500. A branded mesh top—just mesh—sells for over €400. That’s roughly the equivalent of four months' minimum wage in Brazil. In Rocinha, where the campaign was shot, the average monthly income hovers just above €150. For many, even that is unstable. Households spend more on cooking gas than they could ever imagine spending on a handbag.

To stage a luxury fashion shoot in a favela—without redistributing any of the value it extracts—is not a gesture of solidarity. It risks becoming satire.

The campaign’s visual language speaks the dialect of aspiration, but it is an aspiration designed for outsiders. For locals, luxury fashion exists not as a dream but as a mirror of exclusion. When brands like Rabanne enter these spaces, they do so with the posture of admiration—but the posture masks a deeper detachment. What they offer is not access—but spectacle.

And that spectacle is often met, not with reverence, but with irony.

In the favelas, the response to luxury is rarely submission. It’s subversion. Counterfeit goods—Gucci belts, Louis Vuitton bags, Chanel slides—are not just knockoffs. They are commentary. In a place where food, electricity, and safety are the priorities, fashion doesn’t signify status—it signals resistance. It’s a middle finger dressed as desire. Funk MCs wear fake Prada not to imitate Paris, but to mock it.

The Future of Cultural Celebration

Rabanne’s Atlantic Allusions campaign is visually stunning, emotionally evocative, and—yes—well-intentioned. It captures the raw energy of funk with care. It platforms local talent. It generates global attention.

But it also leaves an open question—one that echoes across industries, from music to fashion to media: Will this be remembered as another fleeting homage, another borrowed beat on the global trend radar? Or can it be the start of a deeper conversation about authorship, power, and respect?

Celebration without structural change is still consumption. And as the world continues to mine the margins for aesthetic gold, we must ask:
When will the people who built the rhythm own the rights to the song?
Because in the end, one truth stands: To be inspired is not enough. To empower is everything.