Balenciaga Redesigned the Triple S Shoe — Without Demna
Balenciaga has a new Triple S sneaker. But the designer who helped make it famous has nothing to do with it.
It's nigh-on impossible to whittle down Demna's achievements as head of Balenciaga down to only a couple highlights, so let's settle on acknowledging that the Georgian designer all but singlehandedly reshaped how people dress today. The melding of "streetwear" and "luxury," the positioning of dirty clothes as status symbol, the outré accessories that stirred headlines season after season, even the notion of the modern fashion auteur — That's all Demna, baby.
Though Demna has left Balenciaga, the codes that he established remain. That includes the Triple S sneaker, one of the most influential shoes of the past decade with a spiritual footprint as enormous as its actual footprint.
An anonymous source tells Highsnobiety that Demna was not involved with the creation of the Triple S 2.0 sneaker, seen here for the first time. This shoe was quietly previewed at the luxury label's Madison Avenue flagship store during a Spring 2026 trunk show, where it was available for pre-order alongside a handful of garments from Demna's final collection for the house.
The Triple S 2.0 is barely recognizable as such, only barely borrowing the heft of its forebear. The stacked sole is whittled down to a more slight, but still piecemeal, shape that more naturally anchors the streamlined upper. "Natural" is an odd phrase to use when describing one of the Triple S' offspring but but feels more appropriate for the Triple S 2.0 than for the original design, which was intentionally angled as a freak of sneaker nature.
Befitting the Triple S 2.0's shaved-down sole, the shoe's upper is still elderly but streamlined. Whereas its predecessor aggressively blended panels of color-blocked mesh and leather to create a never-before-seen shoe, the Triple S 2.0 is more recognizable as a shoe. Its striped and mesh-heavy upper recalls an exaggerated retro runner, from the interwoven laces to the pull tab on the heel.
This comparatively conventional upper places the emphasis on the de- and re-constructed sole unit but, even still, the Triple S 2.0 is a more approachable number than the Triple S that shook the world back in 2017. It's an oddly understated follow-up to one of the biggest (literally) luxury sneakers ever made that feels more like an inflated ASICS running shoe than a Triple S sequel.
But since the Triple S' heyday nearly a decade ago, Balenciaga has produced and reproduced a handful of disparate variations on the sneaker as disparate as a Triple S mostly made of rubberized PVC, an all-canvas "workwear" edition, and a crystal-coated shoe only mildly more absurd than the original.
There was even a pre-existing Triple S 2.0, albeit one that earned the title unofficially: a year after the Triple S first released, Balenciaga announced that it would shift production of the sneaker from Italy to China, which lead commentors to dub it the Triple S 2.0 or Triple S V2.
Nowadays, looking at that first Triple S, you can't shake a sensation of quaintness. Shocking as the massive shoe was in the pre-pandemic days, it's become part of the greater fashion wallpaper. Luxury peers like Versace and Gucci produced rival chunksters and Balenciaga itself continued devising huger and huger shoes until, in the late days of Demna's reign, it went in the exact opposite direction. One of the final shoes overseen by Demna, releasing alongside the Triple S 2.0 for Spring 2026, is the self-describing Soleless.
Current Balenciaga overseer Pierpaolo Piccioli is enough of an admirer of the house's more famous thick sneakers that he's still wearing them to this day. Given that they've presumably never stopped being a best-seller for Balenciaga — the label is still producing $1,000 sock sneakers despite their relevance peaking just prior to Triple S' debut — it's hard to imagine Balenciaga ever entirely quitting beefy shoes.
It's just that they won't be the beefy shoes of yesteryear.
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