The Triple S trainer weighs roughly 1.2 kilograms

The Triple S trainer weighs roughly 1.2 kilograms. Worn, it feels like walking with a paperback strapped to each foot. Released in 2017, it retailed for €795 and sold out repeatedly. One can still find pairs on resale platforms, often above original price, which tells you something about where Balenciaga sits in the current landscape — not quite fashion, not quite streetwear, occupying a third category that didn't exist a decade ago.

To approach the house now requires holding two timelines at once. There is the archive: Cristóbal Balenciaga, working in Paris from 1937 until his retirement in 1968, a couturier so exacting that he preferred clients didn't sit down in his clothes. Then there is the present: Demna, the Georgian designer who took creative direction in 2015 and turned the maison into one of the most commercially successful and culturally polarising forces in fashion. The two eras share a name and little else, which is either a betrayal or an evolution depending on whom you ask.

The founder and what he built

Cristóbal Balenciaga Eizaguirre was born in 1895 in the Basque fishing village of Getaria. His mother was a seamstress. He opened his first atelier in San Sebastián at twenty-four, dressing Spanish aristocracy until the Civil War pushed him to Paris. There, on avenue George V, he established the house that would become shorthand for a particular kind of rigour.

He worked in volumes rather than silhouettes. The balloon jacket, the sack dress, the baby-doll line — each one proposed a new relationship between cloth and body, often one that required no waist, no darts, no concession to figure. His sleeves set forward of the shoulder. His collars stood away from the neck. He cut in one piece what others assembled from four. Hubert de Givenchy, who trained under him, later said Balenciaga was the only couturier who could cut, sew, and fit an entire garment himself. Others designed. He engineered.

The house closed in 1968 when Balenciaga, then seventy-three, decided he had no interest in ready-to-wear. He died four years later. For two decades the name sat dormant.

Revival and the Ghesquière years

Jacques Bogart S.A. acquired the dormant house in 1986. A series of designers attempted revivals through the Nineties with little traction. Then in 1997, Nicolas Ghesquière — twenty-five, relatively unknown — was appointed creative director. What followed was fifteen years of work that repositioned Balenciaga as the house for a certain kind of fashion obsessive: someone who wanted intellect and wearability in the same garment.

Ghesquière mined the archive but refused nostalgia. He took Cristóbal's architectural impulse and applied it to motorcycle jackets, skinny trousers, ankle boots with stacked heels. The Lariat bag, introduced in 2001, became one of the decade's most copied shapes. His runway shows felt like research, each collection building on the last. He left in 2012 after a contract dispute. By then the template was clear: Balenciaga could be historically rigorous and commercially relevant at once, provided the designer was willing to hold both in tension.

Demna and the current era

Demna Gvasalia arrived in 2015 with a reputation built at Vetements, the Zurich-based collective that had spent two years trolling fashion's self-seriousness. His first Balenciaga collection featured oversized parkas, deconstructed trenches, and bags that looked like IKEA totes. The fashion press was divided. The product sold immediately.

What followed has been a masterclass in cultural appropriation — not in the fraught sense, but in the literal one. Demna borrows from everywhere: rave culture, corporate branding, refugee aesthetics, American consumerism. The Triple S pulled from Nineties dad shoes. The Hourglass bag reinterpreted a Fifties doctor's satchel. The recent collaboration with Adidas put the three stripes on a Balenciaga track jacket and charged €1.290 for the privilege. Each gesture is both ironic and sincere, which makes it difficult to critique without sounding humourless.

The commercial results are unambiguous. Balenciaga is now Kering's third-largest brand by revenue, behind Gucci and Saint Laurent. The logo appears on T-shirts, caps, slides — categories Cristóbal would not have recognised as fashion. Whether this represents a betrayal of his legacy or a continuation of his disruptive impulse is a debate that will outlast this article.

What to buy and what it costs

If one is approaching Balenciaga for the first time, the question is not whether the house is worth engaging with — that is a matter of taste — but where the value concentrates if you do.

The Triple S, at €950, remains the entry point for many. It is absurdly chunky, surprisingly comfortable, and unmistakable on foot. Demna has since introduced the Track (€795), the Defender (€1.150), and the Runner (€725), each iterating on the same premise: fashion trainers that look like they were designed for a different purpose entirely. All hold resale value better than most sneakers at this price.

Bags begin around €1.190 for the Neo Classic top-handle, a streamlined shape that reads more Ghesquière than Demna. The Hourglass, arguably the house's most successful bag launch in a decade, starts at €2.390 for the small size. It is structured, logo-forward, and engineered to sit on a table without tipping — details that matter in daily use. The Le Cagole, a Y2K-revival style heavy with hardware, runs €2.290 and appeals to a younger customer than the Hourglass.

For clothing, the oversized hoodie (€850) and the logo T-shirt (€475) are the most visible pieces, though calling them investments would be generous. They are markers, ways of signalling fluency in a particular cultural moment. More interesting, and more expensive, are the tailored coats — the cocoon coat at €2.690, the sculptural blazer at €1.990 — which carry forward something of Cristóbal's volumetric thinking, even if the fabrics and finishing are pitched to ready-to-wear rather than couture standards.

Where the house stands

On a recent afternoon in the Marais, I watched a woman in her sixties, impeccably dressed, stop in front of the Balenciaga boutique on rue Saint-Honoré. She studied the window — a mannequin in a distressed denim jacket and Track trainers — for a long moment, then continued walking. A block later, two young men, both in Triple S and logo hoodies, came out of the same shop carrying branded bags. The house, in other words, is serving two entirely separate constituencies, and it is unclear whether they are even aware of each other.

Demna has said in interviews that he sees no contradiction. Cristóbal disrupted the fashion of his time by refusing to flatter the body. Demna disrupts the fashion of his time by refusing to flatter taste. Both stances require a kind of arrogance, a belief that the designer knows better than the customer what the moment requires. Whether that makes them kindred spirits or opposites depends on how much weight you give to intention versus outcome.

What is certain is that buying Balenciaga now is a different proposition than it was under Ghesquière, and radically different than it would have been under the founder. You are not buying into a unified vision so much as choosing which version of the house you want to engage with. The archive pieces, when they appear at auction, command five figures and rising. The current collections move at scale and generate endless online debate. Both are Balenciaga. Both are, in their way, correct.

The woman in the Marais likely remembers when the name meant something else. The young men in the Triple S likely don't care. Somewhere between those two positions is where the house lives now — not quite reconciled, not quite at war with itself, but productively unstable in a way that keeps people looking.