Balenciaga has collaborated with everyone under the sun, but its latest creative partner might be the most Damienciaga of them all. The French luxury house tapped famed artist Damien Hirst, whose first contribution to the label’s 25th anniversary Le City celebration is a Triple S sneaker made more like a souvenir. 

The Le City, originally designed by Nicolas Ghesquière and introduced in 2001, is celebrating a quarter-century of being fashion’s favorite beat-up-on-purpose luxury handbag. What makes this bag so punk is its central design question, asked and answered in the silhouette: What if a motorcycle jacket was a purse? The result was an accessory that looked like it had already lived a chopper-hardened life, with distressed leather, buckles, and enough zippers for any biker’s ol’ lady. 

Every Balenciaga creative director since Ghesquière has done something with the Le City, most notably Demna, who built a world of his own around an accessory, too. The former Georgian creative director had the Triple S, a hyperdrive normcore dad sneaker. 

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Here, as Highsnobiety can exclusively report, the Triple S gets the Le City treatment — as in, it has undergone a hyperdrive Damien Hirst-ification to become a wearable souvenir. Balenciaga’s famously Demna-designed chunky sneaker is the first drop in the Balenciaga | Damien Hirst capsule, a very literal representation of the graphic miscellany one might collect while traveling (see: the chenille peace sign patches and other jokey flim flam attached to this sneaker’s body). 

It’s a fitting opening salvo for an anniversary that celebrates more than a handbag. Le City has been remixed, redux-ed, and referenced so many times that we’ve almost stopped looking at the original silhouette. Demna’s Le Cagole bags took the original hardware-heavy attitude and amped it up to a neon extreme, the former creative director also did Le City mules and stiletto boots. (There’s even a Le City laptop case from an unknown season that lives rent-free in my Farfetch likes.) 

Le City is its own world, telling of just how big Balenciaga’s icons can grow. And how very Balenciaga to enlist one of contemporary art’s most accomplished provocateurs to remind us that fashion’s iconic designs are often the ones that refuse to take themselves too seriously.

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