Late last week, Balenciaga revealed its new Spring 2025 collection in Shanghai. And among the 58 looks unveiled on the runway, one item towered above the rest—literally.
Just when we thought Demna had pushed shoe sizes to the absolute max, the creative director pulled the Balenciaga Platform Sneaker out of his bag of sartorial tricks. The Platform takes the oversized footwear trend to an even yet more unbelievable extreme: with a whopping 16-centimeter rise (that’s over six inches), it’s capable of vaulting wearers to NBA player heights. The stretched-out, oddly distended silhouette adds to the hyperreality of it all. Demna has said the shoe was inspired by the verticality of Shanghai’s skyline; one look at the sneaker and you see exactly what he means.
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The Balenciaga Platform is the kind of sneaker that makes you take stock of the entire footwear space. If we can make shoes with a six-inch rise, why not twelve inches? Why not five feet? It makes you wonder where the boundary truly is, and how far a designer like Demna might be able to push it. Clearly, something like the Platform is close to the outer limits of reasonable sneaker dimensions. But how much further can we go before we cross the line into the absurd?
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On the other hand, exploring the furthest reaches of conventional taste is what Balenciaga does best. These kinds of sneakers challenge expectations and force us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about shoes—about proper sizes and dimensions, about whether this is truly the era of small shoes or whether chunky shoes are about to return with a Godzilla-sized vengeance. Less is more? Sure, but with a brand like Balenciaga, sometimes more is more, too.
This is a designed sneaker to get people talking. And in that sense, it can never go too far.