Balenciaga Debuted a New Sneaker on the Runway at Paris Fashion Week
Shannon Adducci
Style Director
Paris Fashion Week‘s runways may be overrun with ballet flats and kitten heel slingbacks this season, but not so at Balenciaga. At its summer ’24 runway show on Oct. 1 at Paris Fashion Week, the brand stuck to its footwear silhouettes and (nearly) all-black looks for a collection that reinforced of its design codes and aesthetics.
That included a healthy dose of sneakers on the runway, which came in the form of the super-sized Cargo, a new style that made its debut on the runway.
Among the Knife pumps and other all-black heels and boots shown on the runway during the show, the trainers were impossible to ignore. Even chunkier and generally just larger in area size than Balenciaga’s notorious Triple S or 3XL styles, the Cargos had a funhouse mirror quality to them.
It was most evident on some of the slimmer looks worn by men’s models in the collection; a series of uncharacteristically slim plain hoodies and joggers seemed to be purposefully shown to give scale to just how gargantuan the sneakers were.
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Done in mesh and microfiber, the sneakers follow similar shapes to the aforementioned Triple S or 3XL styles from the brand (or even its popular Runners). What is new is a new “B” logo, which could be mistaken for an “M” or even a “3” in its open font work. Unlike the Runners or other styles done with metallics, the Cargo has a tone-on-tone quality, even in its colorful versions. But it is the cartoonish size (reminiscent of the MSCHF Big Red Boot) that really sets it apart.
Following Balenciaga’s pattern of releasing accessories immediately following its runway shows (instead of waiting for the traditional delivery schedule), the brand debuted the Cargo sneaker as a see-now, buy-now item. It is now available on Balenciaga’s site (for 1,190 euros) and also at some of the brand’s Europe boutiques (London’s Bond Street, Milan’s Montenapoleone, and Paris’s Avenue Montaigne and Rue Saint Honoré locations.
The Cargo wasn’t the only new shoe on the runway. Models held black leather derby shoes in hand as they walked the runway, and there were actually ballet flats as well (puffy and soft, they looked like actual ballerinas that were worn with time). There was also a series of fuzzy mules that slyly debuted. Absent from the runway was the Santiago, an exaggerated Western style that Balenciaga had debuted in its men’s footwear and was showing in its most recent collections.
