The moment I first laid eyes on the Balenciaga Bouncer—a tank-like sneaker with tire tread soles, which launched as part of the luxury house’s spring-summer 2022 collection—I fell in love. A photo of the shoes from the runway show became a sort of profane holy image that I worshipped every day on my phone screen. For months over WhatsApp, I pestered an unlucky employee at the Balenciaga store on Montenapoleone in Milan with constant requests for updates on a restock. And yet, while his off-the-wall sneaker creations often engender similar obsessive responses among fashion devotees, the man who designed the Bouncers has almost no real attraction to footwear himself at all.
“I don’t have a specific relationship with sneakers, it’s more the idea of the silhouette that interests me,” Balenciaga creative director Demna tells me. “When I was a child, my father used to create replicas of sneakers in Soviet Georgia, and I remember being fascinated by seeing pieces of different models and soles scattered around his workshop. I tried to understand, even though I was very young, how those separate pieces could come together to form a shoe. I see a sneaker as a kind of three-dimensional sculpture around the foot, forming the base of a complete silhouette. I don’t like wearing classic shoes because they feel snobby and too old-school, but I like seeing them on others. I think everyone has their preferences, but if I could choose, I wouldn’t wear any shoes.”
And yet, during Balenciaga’s fall-winter 2017 show in January 2017, Demna changed the footwear landscape forever with the debut of the Triple S. As bulky as an SAT prep book, the Triple S quickly became ubiquitous on the streets of just about every style-minded city on the planet. “I never premeditate the potential success of an idea or a product,” Demna says. “I simply follow my instinct and create what I personally like or would want to wear. The Triple S was no different. At the time, I wanted a type of sneaker that was different from the others. I believe a product is interesting when it has its own identity, and I believe that’s the case with the Triple S and many of my other products.”
The Triple S’s legacy extends well beyond mere commercial success, pushing footwear to the forefront in Demna’s subsequent collections. “The shoe is the foundation of the silhouette, so I always consider it from the very beginning of the collection process,” Demna explains. “When you work on it, sometimes there’s no doubt, other times it takes a long time to figure it out, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all. But that’s fine too, it’s part of the process. You can’t intellectualize the creative process and design, it’s purely and completely intuitive.”
Demna describes the work of creating a sneaker as “similar to that of a sculpture.” He examines it from every angle, refines the silhouette, and studies the shape from above. “I need to like the way my feet look when I look at them from above. If it doesn’t work, it’s not my sneaker,” the designer says. “My contribution to the process goes from A to Z.”
