This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the global fashion week circuit. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
On Thursday afternoon in Shanghai, Balenciaga creative director Demna was sitting in a hotel room, discussing his magnum opus of gargantuan footwear. “Oh my god, my sneaker team is pretty amazing,” he said. “These are craftspeople.” He was referring to the technical know-how required to engineer the Balenciaga Platform Sneaker, a monstrosity of rubber and mesh that resembles a running shoe pancaked on top of a half-dozen other sneakers. A previous Show Notes column asked if the titanic Balenciaga 10XL represented the apogee of huge sneaker design. I’m happy to report that we have not: when he could no longer build out, Demna built up, to the tune of over six inches of lift.
The online chatter around Demna’s latest mind-melting design was well underway by the time it was officially unveiled on Thursday evening, in a stormy Spring 2025 runway show in front of Shanghai’s jaw-dropping skyline. A few days before, Balenciaga started teasing the sneakers and other surprises, like Under Armour logo earrings, on Instagram. In his nine years at the brand, Demna has rewritten many of high fashion’s holiest rules, and this was a small but important break with tradition, which is that you don’t give away internet-breaking silhouettes or polarizing collabs before they hit the runway. “When I proposed this idea to my team, they were like, ‘Are you sure?’” Demna said with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘Okay, we’re not in the 1960s.’”
Balenciaga
Demna is a master tailor and also a skillful entertainer. His work appeals to the huge audience of people who follow fashion like it’s football, and he’s launched countless products, like leather Ikea bags and towel skirts, that have sparked endless cycles of online debate. His hardcore fans go bananas for a luxury mind-fuck, while the uninitiated gnash their teeth, season in and season out. A towel that you can wear as a skirt? Fashion is dead!
Demna shrugs off the predictable reactions. Of the Platform, he says, “It’s not for everyone, but we have enough sneakers that are different.” Though the mega-shoe was trending on Weibo in the days leading up to his China debut, to Demna the previews serve a different purpose: to focus his audience on the ideas and design elements that go into each collection’s key products, and emphasize the details that are often lost in the viral vortex.
Which is smart, because the longer I’ve covered Demna and Balenciaga the more I’ve realized that the best way to understand Demna’s world is to cut through the complex layers of commentary and dig into the product itself. And often the most extreme and unconventional designs are the ones that most clearly reflect his ideas, many of which spring from his personal experiences and obsessions. (The platform footwear? Demna needed a shoe to wear for a better view at concerts.) In our sit-down several hours before the show, Demna was eager to chat about the many new designs in his Shanghai-sized Spring 2025 collection, one that continues a streak of extraordinarily confident presentations. We got into the (often misunderstood) motivations and ideas behind a collection full of the kind of product he loves to make—products that people love to talk about.
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